Techno Tuesday: Pan-Pot on building a successful duo
Techno Tuesday is a feature on Dancing Astronaut documenting the culture of underground dance music. We’ll bring you exclusive interviews, tracks, and narratives from artists within the techno, tech house, and deep house world in an effort to shed light on some of the best talent outside the world of mainstream dance music.
Over the last decade, Pan-Pot have become evolved into one of the most reputable duos in techno. The German pairing of Tassilo Ippenberger and Thomas Benedix have become a staple at international festivals like Awakenings and Time Warp, while contributing big releases to labels like Mobilee, Watergate Records, and their own imprint, Second State.
Back in November, they released their sophomore album, The Other, nearly 8 years since their debut offering Panorama. Now they’ve been tapped for huge performances from Awakenings’ standalone debut in the US on Valentines Day in New York City, as well as Time Warp’s main event in Mannheim on April 2. Ahead of their appearance, we’ve tracked Tassilo and Thomas down to hear their thoughts on their success as a duo.
Tickets for Awakenings NYC are available here.
Tassilo:
A lot of the time we get asked what it is like to work as a DJ duo and at the end of the day it comes down to having a good teamwork, which we want to talk about. For Thomas and I of course the core team is both of us but the wider team includes a lot more people, let me explain. When we talk about us DJ duo communication is everything, all decisions we make are agreed to by both of us and we talk about nearly every single aspect and subject from big things like overall strategies of our career to small aspects like which flight to take to get to our shows. It also helps that we do see each other a lot, not only when we go on tour but also in the studio and our private time. To talk a lot is really important so we avoid misunderstandings right from the beginning and make sure that we are on the same page.
Over all the years we have worked together, we’ve have built a huge amount of trust, which took years to develop. Usually we pretty much already know what the other person thinks but don’t take things for granted, we constantly keep on communicating. Our trust, that has been built is very important to us especially as we can rely on each other at all times. We stand up for each other on nearly every subject.
Another important thing is that we tolerate each others moods when needs be, not everybody is happy and laughing the whole day even though actually we do laugh a lot and have fun when making music or on tour.Thomas:
All of this is important to keep good teamwork and to avoid frustrations. It does not mean that we don’t do things on our own. For example when it comes to making music we do also start tracks and ideas on our own and bring them together to discuss and finish them. When it comes to playing DJ gigs we developed a blind understanding of track selections but we also talk about music constantly.
It helps a lot that we have quite a similar taste and that we are like-minded on a lot of things. We also try to work with people, who we feel comfortable with. This can be artists we like to collaborate with, such as the ABBY guys on our album, the great producers we have for our label Second State) and also our team in the office with label, agent and management. Everybody brings something to our team, what he or she is really good at and all of this been put together makes it a great and fun to work. All of this grows quite organically and I think it is important that a team has time to develop, as Tassilo said, a good team builds up around trust and that needs time.
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