The Many Faces of Shed, Part 2
An interview with the Berlin techno veteran, who provides a thorough rundown of the many, many aliases he's used over the years.
Fourteen years ago, I interviewed René Pawlowitz for the first time. Even then, he felt like a veteran presence, someone who’d experienced the halycon days of early rave culture and witnessed the arrival of techno in Germany. He had deep ties to Hard Wax, the Berlin shop which was (and still is) widely regarded as one of the best record stores in the world, and more importantly, he’d put out a whole lot of great music as Shed, including records for vaunted labels like Ostgut Ton and 50Weapons.
I loved those Shed records, but when given the chance to speak with Pawlowitz, what I really wanted to ask about was all of the other aliases he’d used. At the time, his Head High moniker was still relatively new, as was the Power House label he’d launched as the project’s official home, and though it had been common for artists to cook up tons of different (and often ephemeral) aliases during the ’90s and 2000s, the practice already felt somewhat unusual by the time that 2012 rolled around. Pawlowitz had already found so much acclaim as Shed, and I wanted to know why he was actively devoting time and energy to developing not just Head High, but several other projects as well.
The resulting piece, “The Many Faces of Shed,” was published by XLR8R, and it provided some (admittedly brief) insights about eight different aliases, which felt like a lot! Pawlowitz hinted that there were a few more, but little did I know that he was just getting started. Over the past 14 years, he’s continued to release music at a startling clip, and while Shed remains his primary endeavor, he’s also introduced approximately a dozen new monikers, flying in the face of the contemporary notion that artists need to develop a singular, easy-to-comprehend public profile.
Later this week, Pawlowitz will be releasing a new Shed album, Rave Echoes. His first full-length in four years, it’s also his debut on the Dekmantel label, who bill the record as “a supple, mesmerising album of angular techno caught between the heat of peak time and the time-blurred hours after the club.” There’s plenty to say about the LP, but once again, I found myself wanting to know about Pawlowitz’s fractured musical personality. More than two decades into his career, he’s operated under 20 different names, and has never seemed particularly interested in providing the public with an outline of what they all mean. But with the new album on the way, I figured that he’d be up for a conversation, and I saw a chance to revisit that old XLR8R piece and assemble something resembling an updated map of the man’s output.
After doing some homework (i.e. a whole lot of digging through Discogs), I got on a call with Pawlowitz last week. He’d spent the day working at Hard Wax—he’s been back at the shop for two years now, and is one the store’s record buyers—yet he remained patient as I methodically went through one alias after another. Despite his initial insistence that all of the different projects are more or less the same, and that many of the names he’s used are meaningless, a bit of prodding revealed a lot more nuance, along with some amusing stories about what inspired some of those names in the first place. Although Berlin techno is often characterized as an overly serious, stone-faced exercise, Pawlowitz repeatedly used the word “fun,” and is as determined to entertain himself as he is to make high-quality new music. (Need proof? He says that making some “Ibiza tech house” is on his musical wishlist.)
What follows is primarily a sequel to my XLR8R article (hence the “Part 2” in the title), with Pawlowitz talking about each one of his different aliases in the first person. But that rundown is also followed by an interview, in which he touches on the new album, the realities of being a 50-year-old raver, his plans for the future and more.