Cristian Vogel Archive Remasters

So talking of your career, with the natural way of cycles of fashion and influence, it seems like your early days are in vogue, a lot of younger producers reference or just sound like you – people are interested in hearing about ‘the old days’…

Around the fire?

Yeah, “Dad what did you do in the techno wars?” – and of course you’re talking about remastering old stuff. Are you feeling the weight of your legacy?

Well it was more just my mum found this box of DAT tapes. [laughs] That’s one thing, then also the YouTube rips that I keep seeing, I don’t think that’s a fair presentation of how much effort I put in to trying to keep the quality of production high. Now we’re living in the future, but somehow that quality of production has been reduced… So I just want to bring it up, to make those things available at the quality it should be at. Not much more complicated than that.

But even now, there’s a lot of difficult decision making about buying equipment, and listening to things, there is still very much a higher production value rather than a lo-fi aesthetic, so in that regard the restoration process is expensive. I will be working with mastering engineers, it’s not going to be a DIY job, and their time is expensive because of the dedication they’ve put into their setups technically. So it’s about 50 DAT tapes, and maybe 80 to 100 tracks that were released – the Tresor catalogue alone is 50-60 tracks – so it’s quite a big project.

But I’ve started to go through them, and there are some interesting qualities of the time which I’m going to try and keep; like, because DAT tapes were expensive – they were about £10 a go – you’ll have a great take going on, which’ll be the take that was released, then it’ll stop and there’ll be another slightly different take still carrying on. Because what I was doing was obviously doing a take, then rewinding to save tape and doing another one over the top of it, which you never do any more because you have endless hard drive so you can do as many takes as you like. So the sense you get from these DATs is someone working very hard with quite limited resources – or sometimes there’s a take where one channel drops out completely and the jam keeps going on one channel. So I think I’m going to try and keep this, in the way that Can did – they’d release a track that gets cut into a different take, or things drop out or whatever. So maybe I do it this way, not really for a nostalgic buzz but…