>> Kompakt
bio: KOMPAKT is all about pushing forward-thinking and Entertaining music.
We do PRODUCTION/ DISTRIBUTION & EXHIBITION created on a platform which allows us to release our music on a completely independent basis. You can compare what we do with farmers that grow organic vegetables and sell them not to supermarkets but directly to consumers. Right now we're running a recordstore, mailorder, a distribution company for roundabout 80 worldwide exclusive labels, the mp3 shop, an artist agency and of course our own labels Kompakt, Kompakt Pop, Kompakt Extra, Immer and K2.
As a record store, Kompakt has been linking the past, present and future of Cologne's house and techno sound for more than ten years. Built up by Wolfgang Voigt, who founded the city's minimal 4/4 reputation in the early nineties, Michael Mayer and Jurgen Paape, the shop quickly gained a reputation as a cultural hub, much like other record shops that have become the basis of so much more (Rough Trade, Wax Trax), and in turn grew to harbor not only a round of like-minded DJ's and producers, but also the Kompakt record labels and club nights.
The cornerstones of Kompakts rise has as much to do with the busy hands of its producers as it does with a collective of deft ears that can slice through to the most compelling details of a long history of club music, strip them, redress them, and throw them back at an audience as something deceptively new. What makes it work is the labels obsession with pop sensibility, not the music itself and the uncanny ability to grow together as a group, proving yet again that all that rises must converge.
Over the course of its eleven-year history, KOMPAKT has operated seven other sub-labels: Auftrieb, Freiland, KOMPAKT Extra, KOMPAKT Pop, K2, IMMER, Kreisel 99, Profan and Studio 1. Of these, KOMPAKT Pop, KOMPAKT Extra, K2 and IMMER are still the most productive. Kompakt Extra houses the Speicher series.
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