Statement _ Interview With 3RD

Is 3RD going to be 100% vinyl? And will you have a Bandcamp for digital later, when the tracks have been out a while?

S-Tek: It’s a tough one. We strongly believe that besides the endless amount of virtual data we have today it is still nice to collect some physical goods. At the same time though, we know that there’s more and more DJ’s playing with laptops. We will release our music on proper 180gr vinyl, with nice artwork and nice sleeves and everything. No cheap pressing but really good collector’s items. Some weeks later we’ll re-release the music digitally so all the people can get their hands on it. We’re also thinking about some additional giveaways like bonus versions for people who buy the vinyl. You will see!

Talking about the sleeves; the artwork is excellent. Will you tell us about that. I know you are all involved with that side of things too. Is that right?

Patrick: There is a story behind everything no? However, this one is quick and simple. The 3 of us love photography. Besides music, Ste (ad.lib) is doing some crazy graphic stuff. He did this amazing series of algorithmic processed pictures based on symmetries and rotations only some weeks before we started to plan the label. Since we wanted to have something personal as the artworks and we all have huge collections of photos on our hard drives, we decided to use this technique for graphics based on pictures of our cities.. Zurich, Frankfurt, Berlin.

Well, it’s very interesting to look at..  really cool, eye catching stuff. Fair play!

Ok, a bit of a serious question now, but one you have kind of touched on already..

There seems to be a never ending stream of mediocre music being released on mediocre labels on both vinyl and digital. As artists and now, label bosses.. how does that make you feel? Is it demotivating, or is it an opportunity to do something constructive?

ad.lib: It’s the same as in every other field of art. The internet makes it easy for people to spread things. Since its cool and computers make it cheap and easy to do poor art, more and more people jump on this train. I could complain for weeks about it, if you are really interested since I am so alienated and sick of it. All the values of culture are kind of falling apart. At the same time, everything is about performance. Numbers need to be optimised and we all compete against the whole world all of the time. Newspapers, TV, photography; everything is losing value and a lot of people cannot differentiate what’s poor from really deep and meaningful things anymore. It’s the generation of cheap and cheerful but I’m sure it’s only a question of time until it changes, as with everything, the values in our minds are in a constant state of change. We learn from what we see. We can adapt and I’m sure people will be tired of the flood of meaningless stupid content they are surrounded by.

We want to do something constructive because only complaining about it is pretty poor. We want to believe in our own work and go on straight without thinking about trends nor standards. We do the best we can and we aren’t trying to be spectacular nor intrusive.

S-Tek: In a way 3RD is an experiment. We are pretty curious to see if there is a market for what we love to do now. I was working on different labels like audiolabor (digital) lately and we all had releases on different established labels. It’s interesting to see how unpredictable sale numbers are.

ad.lib:  A year and a half year ago, I had my first release on Affin with the ad.lib alias. It was collaboration with my friend Silvision, who had not released before. But the 2 unknown names seemed to trigger some interest and the “Collide EP” became the bestselling debut ever and one of the best-selling tracks on Affin in general, which is a label with over 130 releases. It was surprising and motivating that we still can move something without being Len Faki.

Patrick: Anyway, we’ll take our time with 3RD. We believe in the concept and the music and we don’t want to add huge or bitchy promotion strategies to our idea. We’ll keep going and hopefully a lot of people will appreciate it.