Moderat Is Finding Itself Again

As Berliners with techno running through their veins, Moderat is all about how music makes you feel. Now, the electronic masters – formed of Apparat’s Sascha Ring and Modeselektor’s Gernot Bronsert and Sebastian Szary – invite you into its world with the all-new Apple Music 1 radio show Moderat FM, launching on May 3 at 6 a.m. EST, and upcoming fifth album, MORE D4TA.

Moderat has commandeered underground basements, pumped abandoned buildings with bass and melted the brains of Coachella and Alexandra Palace’s dancing crowds. Subsequently, it has built not just a catalog of post-minimalist techno, but a soundtrack of dark yet intricate melodies that have altered the electronic music scene. Originally, Moderat was techno in its most palpable form, but today its work has allowed the trio to eschew a fixed genre or sound, favoring feelings, moments and a nostalgic spirit of the group’s youth.

By doing so Moderat creates music that’s both personal and interpretive, giving its listeners an opportunity to immerse themselves in an experience of their own imagination. Now, Moderat is putting the focus back onto its own memories, thoughts and feelings with Moderat FM, which as Gernot Bronsert tells HYPEBEAST, has been “band therapy in a good way” as it sets out to find itself again, remember “very personal friendships” and tell its story from an honest and unheard perspective.

HYPEBEAST: What made Apparat and Modeselektor form Moderat in 2002?

Gernot Bronsert: There was a very small festival in Berlin and there was a club there, and we had the chance to perform in front of people as Modeselektor. We hadn’t been on stage that much before, so we brought all of our working equipment from the room we called a studio to the venue and performed a breakbeat, breakneck fan show. It wasn’t really serious.

After us was another act called Apparat and he did the total opposite to us, he had an amazing setup with a new Apple MacBook Titanium and a super fancy controller. He played melodic, fragile music and that was the total opposite of what we did before.

We got super drunk after the show and became friends. We were so different musically but we found out we had the same background – all three of us are from the Eastside, we had the same experiences after the reunification [of Germany] and we had a lot of things in common.

Moderat doesn’t have much to do with Apparat or Modeselektor, it’s still a thing that’s between the three of us. I think the interesting thing is that when we work as Moderat, we play this role of Moderat and step out of our other projects and we experience a very personal friendship.

What makes something distinctively Moderat, as opposed to something by Apparat or Modeselektor?

We are not trying to recreate Modeselektor or Apparat, we step out of those worlds. We try to recreate a state of mind, one that we experienced together when we were younger. The sound of Moderat is always as timeless as possible, we try to create the spirit of techno that we’ve experienced.

It has nothing to do with the music style, it’s about the sound and the mood. It’s all through feeling.

And over the last two decades, how has Moderat honed in on this particular sound to define who it is?

I hope that we make personal music that doesn’t follow the rules of electronic music. We always try to create something different, not new, because you cannot recreate, redefine, or reinvent techno music because it’s always been there. It’s the sound – nice, warm noises, deep bass, a mix of sounds.

[Groups like] Basic Channel were the music we grew up listening to, they were the soundtrack to our childhood. It’s not the music, it’s the sound of the music and it brings back so many memories. You remember the first time you smoked an ice bong. You get into this parallel dimension that we’ve all experienced on the dance floor; when you really forget about time, who you are and what you are. It’s about the moment.

Sascha [aka Apparat] started singing at some point to just have more tools to put into the soup, more ingredients to cook with.

20 years on, Moderat is launching Moderat FM through Apple Music. Why is now the time to get on the airwaves in a more personable way?

We’ve never told the story before. Even though we’ve given many interviews in the past about particular records and ourselves as a band, I think the radio show has given us the chance to tell our story from a very personal perspective.

Is there something about radio that excites you?

You have a personal connection and you know that someone is going to listen to what you say carefully and that makes it interesting to us. We learned so much about ourselves and remembered details that some of us had forgotten, it’s a process, a public process, band therapy. In a good way.

Each Moderat FM episode will center around a different album chronologically. Do you have a favorite Moderat album, or are all these projects seen as one big idea?

It’s really hard to have a favorite. I could pick out songs that I really like, but I think every record popped up as the record that it is. We never had a concept behind it, we never planned anything, we just tried to get into the right mood to open the channels, to get inspired to make music together.

Every record shows a different stage of our life. The very first Moderat FM episode is about our first EP, we made it together shortly after we first met. We hadn’t played any shows before, so it was a process. All the music we’ve created is a document of our friendship.

So when you collate all the EPs and albums it’s almost like an audio photobook?

Yeah, pretty much. It’s like synesthesia. You can listen to a track and receive feelings, pictures, memories. We tried to force that with our music and to create music that glues stuff together that we’ve experienced in the moment. It’s not easy to explain because we don’t really get it. We follow our feelings and the hard part is to get rid of overthinking.

How is this feeling conveyed in Moderat FM?

We found out about these feelings by talking about them. We didn’t prepare too much before each episode, so we just remembered while we talked. When we started recording the first Moderat record we went on tour straight away and we never had too much time to reflect on things like this. This radio show gives us the chance to reflect on our history, what we did and what we do, and to understand ourselves a little bit better.

The radio series will lead up to your upcoming album, MORE D4TA. What can we expect from this new release?

That’s a really hard question. Every artist hates this question, but I’ll give you an answer.

I think MORE D4TA is the best record we’ve ever done. It’s different compared to the records before but it does carry our sound, vibe and mood. The circumstances in which this record was recorded were different as well because of the pandemic situation.

How did the pandemic affect your work?

Without recording this record we wouldn’t have survived healthily with all the fear in the air. I wasn’t personally scared to get sick but the global collective fear was surrounding all of us and it was killing my inspiration. We planned to make this record anyway so we put ourselves in a personal lockdown – being together in the studio and writing new music… I think I would have suffered more than I did [if Moderat did not make music].

The pandemic didn’t affect the music, I really don’t want the energy of fear to be a part of my music.

You made it as a way to get through the pandemic, but it’s not a response nor recognition of fear.

Exactly. The pandemic helped us to speed up the process and to go to the studio together as friends. When we stopped in 2017, we didn’t talk to each other for maybe two years, not a phone call, not a text, nothing. We wanted to have a break, not that we were pissed off at each other, we just focused on different things. The families were growing, everyone got a new kid and we were busy with that.

The pandemic helped us focus on each other again, which is even harder when you have family and so many other things going on.

What do you want Moderat fans to take from MORE D4TA and Moderat FM?

We want the people who listen to our music and radio show to be taken into our personal world. Moderat is not upfront, we have our band photos and we are on stage but Moderat is pretty anonymous. It’s part of our lifestyle and where we are from – the underground techno scene – and we let the music speak. We want to take the people with us and show them who we are and what we do.

We’ve tried to create an honest, personal moment.