On the face of it, everything has been all rosy for TJ Hertz, the DJ and producer better known as Objekt, in recent years. With two of the past decade’s most highly rated electronic music albums in the PAN-released Flatland and Cocoon Crush under his belt, he’d also been maintaining a reasonably steady, though not especially prolific, run of club-focused white label 12-inch records since first breaking out in 2011 – all of this while continuing to hone his reputation as one of the world’s best DJs, as adept at playing driving 4×4 party tunes as he was at taking dancers down a wormhole of confounding, stripped-back rollers. So far, so good.
Feeling a slight sense of stagnation, however, he recently decided he needed a new project to sink his teeth into: Kapsela, his first fully fledged label. The imprint, which has launched with a reissue backed by remixes of his 2014 classic ‘Ganzfeld’ and the two-track EP Chicken Garaage, “feels like a new chapter at a time when I really needed it,” Hertz tells me over a video call from his Lyon hotel room ahead of a festival set later that night. “I wanted the opportunity to spread my wings a little further, creatively speaking, as well as be able to work more closely with other people if I wanted to do that on certain things. I had this realisation that lots had changed since I moved to Berlin and started putting out music, but actually in many ways I was still doing exactly the same thing as I had been since 2011. I was living in the same neighbourhood and had just left my job at Native Instruments for the third or fourth time.”
Though Hertz says he hasn’t yet fully established a timeline for how it will take shape, the allure of working with others more closely – including providing a platform for people to release their music – was an especially strong starting point for Kapsela. “It’s about establishing connections with other like-minded people that I want to support and work with more generally; people that I feel some form of kinship with,” he says. “I really like the idea of working more collaboratively in general – not necessarily even on music – and just being less of an island in the way I approach putting out my own music.”
The launch of Kapsela has also coincided quite nicely with a change in Hertz’s workflow that he hopes might speed up his creative process going forward. He’s been open in the past about how his detail-focused approach to production, especially sound design, has seen tracks go through more than 100 iterations at the demo stage, and says he found himself at a crossroads last year where he was left thinking that “something had to change if I wanted to do this long-term”. It’s partially through tips discovered via a music production coach that was advertised to him on Instagram (yes, the algorithm does work sometimes), as well as some off-the-cuff studio sessions with fellow techno producers like Skee Mask, Quelza and Fergus Sweetland, that he’s been able to let go of some of his previous hang-ups and speed the process along on both a practical and mental level.
‘Chicken Garaage’, the title track from his latest EP, is one of the earliest products of that new workflow. Rooted around Si Begg-esque breaks and the proto-dubstep and dark garage of the early 00s, it carries all of the precision-engineered hallmarks of an Objekt production, as well as a delightfully fun earworm of a bassline – Hertz is of course no stranger to an especially catchy melody or bassline having given us 2017’s most ubiquitous club banger in ‘Theme From Q’. “The first sketch of ‘Chicken Garaage’ was basically just the drums and the bassline, and I was almost trying to channel 2000s Shackleton, the track ‘Naked’,” Hertz recalls of the track’s conception. “When I started layering up the drums is when it started resembling more early 00s proto-dubstep, so I leant into that a little more, but I’d say most of my club records started as, if not a pastiche, an homage to something or an attempt to make a certain sound, which then diverges significantly over the production process.”
Hertz’s Baker’s Dozen touches on albums discovered in childhood, as well as his twenties following his post-university relocation to Berlin, but, for the most part, leans on artists he first became aware of as an impressionable 17 and 18-year-old, even if he admits he didn’t quite listen to their full albums at the time. “While I was pulling out records for this piece, I dug out my old hard drive, which miraculously still works, and I was going through the downloads from when I was around 15 to 18, which was when I was getting my music from LimeWire, Soulseek, Napster,” he says. “I was recalling the exact sequence of discovering certain songs and artists, and there was an Aphex Twin track next to, I don’t know, a Les Savy Fav song, and then something by Sugababes, Incubus, Throbbing Gristle. This is the kind of mode of consumption you’re in when you’re that age.”
Objekt’s latest EP, Chicken Garaage, is out now on Kapsela. To begin reading his Baker’s Dozen, click ‘First Record’ below.
