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Techno musician Schablitzki alias Robag Wruhme: Electronic music was the way into the world for him
Photo: Compact
DJ is a strange job.
Very few who even start putting on records at night think about where the journey is going in the first few years.
You make people dance and you also get money for it, what could be better?
DJs are also weird hybrids.
Of course, mixing records is a creative activity, but does that make you a musician yourself?
DJs have always had to live in this uncertainty, which is why the pandemic hit them even more than most other creative people: Because what if the whole framework in which you moved breaks away?
When there is no longer a dance floor that could be played on?
Then not only is there no more money.
The sense is gone too.
There is little left to hold on to.
It should be the luck of Gabor Schablitzki, 46, that he has always been both: a gifted DJ, someone who, at the height of a Saturday night, gets to grips with a dance floor full of drunk English people, someone who just as much a few hours later knows how to stroke a group of exhausted people with a gentle atmosphere.
But then he is also a musician, one of the few "authors" of electronic music who has found his very own sound.
So he is now sitting at home, making music - and there he recorded a masterpiece from a DJ mix under his stage name Robag Wruhme: “Connecting the Dots” (listen here on Kompakt).
Schablitzki grew up in Apolda, Thuringia, and grew up as a child of the lively techno scene in Jena (so lively that he moved to Weimar at some point because it annoyed him when he was photographed in the supermarket, as he recently told in a nice interview ).
With his DJ partner Sören Bodmer he traveled the country for years under the name Wighnomy Brothers.
He's been doing this alone for about ten years.
All that remains is the hope that one day it will start again.
Schablitzki is an artist's soul, someone who already knew at school that he didn't fit into any grid.
One of those who consciously saw the collapse of the GDR, the end of the known order and the loss of importance of authorities that just seemed unassailable.
For him, electronic music was the way out into the world: first in the record stores in Berlin and then, when it was clear that you could make this music yourself, in clubs all over the world.
As a DJ, as an artist.
“Connecting the Dots”, on the other hand, is a new series from the Cologne technology label Kompakt, for which one of the house's artists is given the opportunity once a month to choose from the many thousands of items in the huge Kompakt catalog that has come together over the past 25 years to make a mix.
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DJ Robag Wruhme: 71 minutes long techno story
Photo: Compact
Wruhme took 22 tracks, almost all of them unknown pieces.
They are arranged very roughly in chronological order, so if you want, you can hear this mix like a minimal techno history lesson, which leads from the ambient sounds of a Dettinger and the reduced clapper of Wolfgang Voigt's Studio 1 project to one of the surreal designs by DJ Koze - and to Wruhme's own track »Calma Calma« from last summer.
But you don't have to know any of that.
Because this mix is above all a short story.
A 71 minute long story about feelings.
About melancholy, about euphoria, about happiness, about sadness, about longing - but also about being in agreement.
Wruhme takes the pieces and doesn't just thread them together.
He puts them together, sometimes lets three or four tracks run at the same time and conjures up that dance floor happiness that is unfortunately only for the head at the moment.
That has its brooding moments, just as Schablitzki is also a loner.
Then again it bursts with humor and world embrace.
Nobody knows how long the pandemic will last.
The Berlin Club Commission recently announced that it could possibly take until spring 2022 for normal operations in the clubs to resume.
It should look similar in other cities.
So for the time being there is nothing left but the hope that it will start again one day.
The memory of what was there once, as a guide for the hopefully not too distant future.
And it remains a mix like “Connecting the Dots”, which swims like a message in a bottle through the dark sea of Corona destruction.
A message sent out by a man who sits on a life raft like all of us, who whistles and claps and knocks to himself there.
“SOS!” Shouts Robag Wruhme and saves the souls of those who hear him for 71 happy minutes.
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