German producer Sascha Ring aka Apparat is one of my heroes and is also one of the owners of Shitkatapult records along with tech-punk maven T.Raumschmiere (Marco Haas)…

Starting out with dance floor-oriented techno, he later started to create ambient music and more recently became “more interested in designing sounds than beats”.

Apparat is the bridge over the German gap of melancholic glitch between Manchester and Laptop-USA. His smart wiring of emotions produces a virtual musical reality, which is based upon different genres, depending on the surrounding of the “apparat”. In his studio, dense, dark and majestic clouds of elegiac pop and heavy Electronica built up to a coherent and emotionally charged atmosphere. Live, on the other hand, the dance floor seems to be repelled to rave from the Bermuda Triangle with its axes Techno, IDM and Elektro. Those styles cannot necessarily be distinguished and heard on every of his releases, but since he started out with a much harder pace of electronic music in the early nineties, his influences are definitely Techno and Elektro as well.

The intensity in Apparat’s tracks seems to grow with his own pleasure in experimenting. The charming breaking-up of the mechanical walkover of his Elektronica compositions first being subtle clicks and accidental “sound mistakes”, this is now being done by veritable musicians and singers, by classical instruments like violin and cello, saxophone and clarinet, which are then masterly orchestrated by Apparat as the Maestro of his computer.

He’s worked with many renowned producers and artists over the years as Monolake, Modeselektor, Thomas Fehlmann, Telefon Tel Aviv, Anders Ilar, Luisine and Ellen Allien most of them are involved on his latest album, and that’s a rather unfinished impression. ‘Things To Be Frickled’ gives much more than one could expect and deserves a greater attention…

Check out some of his finest releases:

And a bit more about him

Apparat:
- uses computers and various devices to generate sounds.
- is never satisfied with anything.
- likes the woods, the sea and the mountains.
- comes out of the woods close to the sea just by the mountains.
- fears getting erased from myspace again.
- enjoys good single malt whiskey. maybe a little bit too much.
- hasn..t got time to listen to “a new song on myspace”.
- sometimes gets along with women slightly better than with men.
- would really like to have a greyhound but berlin isn..t the place for that.
- dosen..t play any instrument very well.
- forgets to tell some people how important they are from time to time.
- tends to waste nice summers.
- has no secret weapon to make certain tones and noises.
- gets mad about things quite easily.
- probably needs a haircut a bit more often.