Christopher Bleckmann and Hannes Wenner are the super duo behind the hyper talented tech house force known as Misc. and the minimal techno group, Niederflur. They also grind regularly on three other electronic music projects: Monophace (futuristic drum and bass), Clubsessel (downtempo afterhours club music) and Van Delta (every EDM style possible thrown into a synchronized kitchen blender).   Misc. has releases under a variety of high brow tech house labels including Force Tracks, Sender, Resopal, Kompakt and Klang. Niederflur is exclusively the property of Richie Hawtin's seminal label Minus, with four releases to date. Their other projects have garnered releases on Krush Grooves, Precision, k2o, and Gap.   Fwd.dj has the huge honor of catching Bleckmann and Wenner for a special interview and an ear popping exclusive mix! 1. How do you decide which moniker to make a track for at any given time? Do you let the creative process dictate which style you produce next or do you choose based on label/public interest? Actually we didn´t produce any other style but techno in a while. Only lately we´ve been producing a few dubstep tracks some of which will be released as misc. on british label Lost Souls soon. But even between the techno we do as misc. and as Niederflur there is a different approach of course. Most of the times we woud start a bunch of tracks for one project at a time and finish them in the same direction. But sometimes it also happens that we feel that a single track draws in another direction and switch. So it´s more of an intuitive/personal thing. 2. What bridged the gap for you between drum and bass and tech house/techno, what made you decide to get involved with the new production styles? We´ve always been into different styles of electronic music. Drum&Bass was only the first to be released. We like to see the connection rather han the gap... 3. How does it feel to be released on one of the most prominent labels in the EDM world (minus), do you enjoy working with the label/Richie Hawtin? Totally! When we first worked with minus it wasn´t  the huge label it is today. At one point we thought we were finished with Niederflur and didn´t work on stuff for years. But then Rich himself asked us to contribute new stuff for the min2max compilations and that opened our minds and inspired us to work on the project again. We´re very pleased to be still on board and get the full support by the minus-crew for our sound. 4. Niederflur is completely based around the German underground subway system. Can you provide us with more information about that project, its inspiration and the music production? Well, that was the start. The early series of 12" and the CD were really much inspired by the underground-machine-world. When we moved to cologne 10 years ago we couldn´t believe the robot-anouncements for the stations had local accent. But they did. Having some early rave-anthems in mind, where the announcments were used as signal-breaks we decided to put that in a new context: very minimal techno. So we went around town by night with our sampler and captured all the voices, sounds and atmospheres we liked in cologne subway system. Back at home we cut that and worked a lot on the sounds to combine it with the minimal techno we had in mind. Today of course our concept isn´t as strict anymore. We don´t really use these sounds anymore… but sometimes we drop an old sample somewhere in back of a mix! 5. What software/hardware/sample packs do you guys use when producing? Is it all the same for each style of music or are certain audio tools better for certain genres? We are working with Cubase 4 for productions and Ableton LIVE! for playing live. The setup in Cubase is basically the same for all of our music but of course some synthes and tools are more important here and there... 6. What do you perceive to be the future of dance music to be? Do you have a clear vision for the scene and its progression? Well techno and dance music in general are probably kind of another basic scheme of human music-listening just as Rock or Hip Hop is. So it´s definitely here to stay forever. There always be developments to different to one side of techno or the other , but we don´t expect a whole new revolution as the one 20 years ago. Maybe through digital performance tools surround productions will become a new standard both in (digital) releases and club performances. Surround speaker systems could add a whole new experience to electronic dance music. But we think, that´s still a long way to go… 7. Have you guys been considering any new monikers? If so what kind of music will they produce? No, not yet… could happen, though. 8. What artists/concepts/events originally inspired you to produce electronic music? What artists do you think are currently inspiring the modern generation? Probably it´s both the same. We consider ourselves as kind of 2nd generation. Before us there were all the Detroit heros from Juan Atkins to Jeff Mills and of course Richie Hawtin. On the other side there was the German part with the Basic Channel guys, Wolfgang Voigt and others. When you listen to modern Techno it´s quite obvious that it is based on all these great artists from the past (and present, too)! 9. If you guys where going to start a new records label tomorrow and could have 5 dance music artist of your choice release music on it, who would they be and what would be the label's theme? Well, if money was no issue at all, there probably wouldn´t be any dance-artists on our label, and we´d try out anything that we feel nobody tried out before! Cross-over every musical genre and every musical artist on the planet, no matter what cultural background or musical history until something new pops up, if that´s possible at all. Our concept thus would be: burn the money or give it to us, haha! 10. What does the rest of 2008 hold for you and your various projects? We are happy to have a new Niederflur 12" on minus called "TYPO EP" out in july. The next MISC. release is the Lost Souls 12" which contains Techno and Dubstep tracks by us and great remixes by Perc and Headhunter. We did a remix of one of FUSE´s classical tracks for PLUS 8… and we have some stuff waiting to be released later this year we can´t talk about right now… so there´s more to come! 11. Do you have any comments about this mix? This mix is a studio recording that features some older and newer tracks that we felt would go together pretty nicely…   since we always perform on stage without playlist or a fixed set-length, we just pushed the rec. button and went for it like we used to do on stage. And stopped at 66 minutes… Less