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Introduction
Tobias.—an unassuming enough name (and note the spelling, please:
that's Tobias., period!). But his productions are anything but
understated: Street Knowledge, Dial, Balance, I Can't
Fight The Feeling and of course his latest release on Perlon, She -
these are the recordings that have animated dance
floors and enthralled critics over the past several years. Not to
mention remixes for the likes of Efdemin, Los Updates, Two
Armadillos, Russ Gabriel, D'Julz and more, all cumulating in a slew of
releases for era-defining imprints like Perlon, Cadenza, Bpitch, Wagon Repair,
OstGut Ton, Liebe Detail, Circus Company, Simple and Buzzin' Fly.
As minimal techno has risen and fallen, as deep house has gone from
guilty pleasure to crate staple, Tobias. has worked steadily away,
synthesizing elements from decades of electronic experimentaion into
one of the most distinctive styles in contemporary electronic dance
music.
How do you even begin to sum that up? One phrase: "Non Standard Is
the Standard."
If you had to articulate Tobias Freund's musical philosophy in a single
phrase, that would almost certainly be it. It's right there in the names:
in his record label Non Standard Productions and also Non Standard
Institute, his collaborative project with Max Loderbauer.
Of course, everyone wants to be non-standard nowadays. What makes
Freund different—what earns him the right to the Non Standard tag—is
that he doesn't throw the baby out with the bathwater. Standards are
all about fealty to an ideal, and no one is more faithful to certain
musical ideals—the defamiliarizing power of electronic sound, the
libidinal spirit of house music—than Freund.
With a life's work (that sounds so much nicer than "career") reaching
back to include more than 20 years of composition, experimentation,
performance and professional engineering work, Tobias has learned
what makes a standard work. It's those lessons that allow him to step
beyond the known, to create something radically new, in every one of
his records.

An Underground Background
Freund began making music in 1980, spurred into action by the
purchase of a Korg MS-20; his first "official" musical project was Vo
Ese, a partnership with Viktor Sol. Working with the MS-20 and a tape
machine, and synthesizing ideas from the avant-garde and nascent
currents of electronic body music, the pair approached the project
without predetermined structures or commercial ambitions, setting the
tone for all of Freund's work to follow.
Freund's freeform electronic investigations found a more conventional
focus in his day job as a recording engineer. Beginning as an
apprentice, he would go on to spend nearly 20 years working behind
the boards for pop musicians like La Bouche, Milli Vanilli and Meat
Loaf. The job, says Freund matter-of-factly, was just a job—a way to
earn money and stay up to date with high-end studio equipment. (One
forgets that before the personal computing explosion, access to a
professional studio was a requisite for even the most underground
electronic musician.)
It's easy to be amused by the idea of a rigorous electronic minimalist
like Freund working with a performer as maximal (in every sense of
the word) as Meat Loaf. But Freund's engineering background is a
crucial part of the way he makes music. Approaching the recording
studio as an instrument itself, he belongs to a distinguished lineage
stretching through Phil Spector, Teo Macero, King Tubby, David
Cunninham and the electronic pioneers of New York, Chicago and
Detroit.
In the '90s and '00s, Freund adopted a handful of aliases, including
Metazone, Phobia and Zoon, but most of his energy went into two
projects: Pink Elln and Sieg Über Die Sonne. As Pink Elln he explored
everything from ambient to electro-funk to acid, appearing both solo
and alongside Atom Heart (Uwe Schmidt) on a host of releases for
Ongaku, Rising High, Saasfee*, Logistic and others. Many of these
were live recordings—an unusual format for electronic music, but one
perfectly suited to Freund's approach, whose twin poles are process
and spontaneity. Sieg Über Die Sonne, a duo with Dandy Jack (Martin
Schopf), was Fruend's other principal outlet, with four album releases
for Dance Pool and Multicolor that moved gradually from brittle techno
to a fuller-bodied and unconventional take on club-ready electronic
pop.

Present Processes and the Future Perfect
Having pulled the plug on Pink Elln, and with Sieg Über Die Sonne on
hiatus, Freund has moved into what might be the most exciting phase
of his career. Working both solo (as Tobias.) and alongside Sun
Electric's Max Loderbauer in Non Standard Institute (NSI.), Freund has
redoubled his efforts to strip house and techno back to their most
skeletal forms, all the while pushing at the limits of electronic sound
design. (To those projects add Odd Machine, an open-ended
collaborative investigation whose first release featured Freund and
Ricardo Villalobos; the project will expand over time to include a wide
variety of musicians.)
It's instructive that a musician with over two decades of studio
experiments would forsake gizmos for a tried-and-true kit. Using the
computer primarily as a recording device, Freund relies on a few
staples like the Roland TR-808 and 909, hardware sequencers, vintage
analog or modular synthesizers, and outboard effects. His productions
are investigations before they become "songs," the result of hands-on
explorations and years of experience. To watch Freund at work is to
realize that electronic musicians can be just as much "instrumentalists"
as their acoustically inclined colleagues: Freund's 808 patterns are
written and performed in real time with a fluid grace that
demonstrates the depth of the relationship between man and machine.
Freund is a purist, but not in the conventional sense. Precision, clarity
of purpose and spontaneity are the three pillars of his music, and you
can detect their weight behind every element of his music. He might
be said to be a minimalist only to the extent that he shuns excess.
Maybe "purity" is just shorthand for a maxim of the photographer
Wolfgang Tillmans: "If one thing matters, everything matters." In
Freund's music, every single thing matters, from the envelope on the
kick drum to the precise filtering of an open hi-hat. Nothing is
extraneous, nothing is let slide. That attentiveness shines through in
the music, which might be one reason Tobias.' records have been
played and charted by dance music's heaviest contenders, and lauded
and applauded by critics the world over. At a time when electronic
music so often seems to be going through the motions—a museum
curio, dusted off and gussied up for revolving-door crowds—Tobias.
treats it as a living thing, its history crashing into its futurist yearnings,
a shapeshifting timeline reconfigured with every shuddering drum
pattern and every ecstatic vocal sample. It's the real deal, this
restless, self-generating music that refuses to rest on its laurels,
refuses to believe that electronic music begins and ends with the 4/4
and a handful of chords. Non-standard is the standard: Tobias., full
stop.

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