"Controlled coincidence": How Kasper Marott makes his rave-fuelled techno

What inspired ‘Keflavik’?

I made the track at Reykjavík–Keflavík airport during a 10-hour layover on the way back home from the States. It took shape pretty quickly without any premeditated thought. I was basically killing time and trying to stay awake. I don’t think too much when producing. Pretty much every idea, vibe or energy is made out of what you could call ‘controlled coincidence’. I make sure to keep myself inspired by music, friends, society and our local community, but I try not to think too much about it and just let my intuition be in control. ‘Keflavik’ is a pretty good example of this balance. We have a strong rave scene in Copenhagen where nostalgia, hi-energy and 90s trance/techno cuts have a big influence on the music at parties. The energy and tempo in ‘Keflavik’ are directly related to that, but also related to my large collection of 80s Italo disco records and a Thursday night residency I had with Alfredo92 and DJ Graveyard years back where we spent a lot of time digging for percussive and weird-sounding disco and house cuts. This combination is not something I came up with before I made the track, it just happened.

How did you finish it?

For the drums I used some great samples from the Roland 808 and some recorded cymbals. To get the right punch in the kick, I layered it with other processed 808 kicks and used Fabfilter’s ‘Saturn’ to add distortion. I made the main lead/synth line using U-HE’s Diva. The bassline is partly Diva and partly Minimonsta from G Force. The sub-bass is Minimonsta and the mid-range area is Diva. I use Minimonsta almost every time for sub-bass, usually just a single oscillator square wave. The gated vocal synth coming in around three minutes is another U-HE trance-infected synth called Hive. After I made the track in Keflavik airport, the hard work kicked in. I spent almost a year mixing this tune and I have roughly 50 different mixdowns. It was hard to find space for every part and I ended up letting my good friend Joel Krozer do the final mix!

The Keflavik EP is out now on Seilscheibenpfeiler

Check out his studio setup below

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