After a few years he was given the chance to join the internal A&R and label department, meaning he was also jointly responsible for Straight’s own in-house labels. Certainly not that I could ever do it full-time.”īut, knowing he wanted to pursue music as a career (in whatever form that may be), in 1999 Normen landed a job at Music Mail/Straight Distribution, a vinyl distribution in his hometown of Stuttgart, as a member of the sales staff. “Basically it was always a hobby for me and I never really thought I could make money with it. The only information about producing I got was from magazines (mainly from KEYS) or from books.” Sometime later, he also got to know other producers with whom he could also learn from and share tips. “I was literally addicted to learning it, and at that time there were no tutorials/blogs on the internet, no YouTube. Having learnt production techniques from his friend and “a lot of trying things by myself,” he spent many nights honing his craft. “Sometimes I would sit in his small basement studio and just watch with interest.”Īround 1996, he bought an Atari ST computer with Cubase, and then his first Synth (Yamaha CS-1X), and “starting to screw together my first tracks.” This natural affinity for music stems back to a childhood during which he learnt to play accordion “because my parents really wanted me to.” At that time, he thought it was “totally stupid and useless,” but it would prove useful when it came to making his own dance productions. “I wanted to understand how the music is structured,” he recalls, adding that a friend had already started to produce music around the same time. It led him to “fall in love with this kind of melodic, deep, trancy but not cheesy atmospheric dance music where there is also an element of story-telling all those things were my first influences, and I think that was very quickly anchored in me.”Īfter buying his own DJ equipment in the ‘90s, Solee soon started making his own music. Soon after, his eyes lit up at formative rave experiences inside clubs like Dorian Gray in Frankfurt or Oz in Stuttgart. “I would be listening to the legendary HR3 clubnight on German radio every Saturday, which was the only chance for me to hear this kind of music mixed by great DJs,” Normen remembers. In the early ‘90s, Solee was a huge fan of the Frankfurt sound: DJs like DJ Dag, Sven Väth and Pascal FEOS, and labels like Harthouse, Eye Q and Noom. “It was always the melodic and deep atmospheric tracks which caught my attention.” “For me, music should reach you emotionally - it must touch your soul,” says Normen Flaskamp (aka Solee), co-founder of the German house and techno imprint Parquet Recordings.
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