Frankfurt’s Playhouse records was well named. Founded as a sister label to the thundering Klang Electronik, it found its feet as a home for the more playful, devious and downright weird strains of house that were coming out of Germany at the time. Notably, this included the work of Isolée, Roman Flügel and Peter Kremeier, AKA Losoul, a producer whose music was often dubbed “minimal house” but was always far more interesting and oddball than that label implies. 

Losoul’s debut album, Belong, was home to at least two stone-cold but very strange house classics in the withering, robotic sleaze of Lies and Overland, a song that somehow managed to re-invent Michael Jackson’s Billie Jean by slathering it in fuzz. 

Playhouse is no longer but Losoul continues in force. His fifth studio album, Broken English Dubs, is one of his strongest, wending its elegantly strange way between house, soul, jazz and early hip hop, via shaky electro (Shake 3), Moodymann-ish slink (Cult Rodeo) and a metallic scratch sound that splits the difference between scratching records and taking a huge clod of steel wool to an enemy’s car (The Peek-A-Boo Scratch).

I spoke to him in September 2026, just before the record was released. We spoke about lingua franca, late-night beer shops, re-inventing Michael Jackson (although the name goes unsaid) and his very unique vision of club culture.

The interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Ben Cardew:

Can we talk a bit about the new album? It's called Broken English Dubs. Where did that title come from?

Losoul:

There's a little story behind it. I was traveling quite a lot as a DJ and as a live performer and you meet so many people around the globe. I played almost on every continent in my 30 years of performer's career. And I found out that broken English, just as kind of a language, is the most commonly spoken language in the world. 

Most people in the world speak some kind of English and it connects people everywhere pretty easily. It doesn't even have to be perfect English. It's kind of a human language to my experience.

Ben Cardew:

I was wondering about the cover of the new record, which I find quite intriguing. It's three young men in a shop. For me, it looks quite British. I'm not sure if it is. What's the thinking behind the cover?

Losoul: 

The story is kind of funny. It's actually from Berlin. It's a Berlin shop but I guess in London you have similar kind of night shops, where you can buy everything, like convenience stores. In Germany, in Berlin, they are called Spätis, because Spätis means you can buy very late at night. And everybody goes to get a beer or to get something at night, like chips or cigarettes, everything.

And this is also where people from all cultures meet. It's like a… I wouldn't say forum, because, no, people don't really get together in a cultural way, as [in] a club maybe. But this [Spätis ] is actually in our music culture, this brings people together, after the club, [or] when people go there before the club for a drink or to get a cigarette. 

These young people [on the cover] are actually people we got to know there. They are guys who came from Ukraine. So there's also even an open political aspect to it. They are actually refugees or people who came over here to have a better life. 

So these people are young people with a lot of their lives ahead of them and they join the Berlin culture of nightlife, of music, of what Berlin stands for, for quite a long time. 

So many people from all over the world come to Berlin, mainly for the music or for the nightlife or for meeting people from everywhere. (And nowadays it's a little bit different, but that's another story. It's more organised than it was 20 or 30 years ago.) But there's this history of Berlin, especially of electronic music, which gives most people in the world there… I wouldn't say a home, but a place to meet people and to meet like-minded people in a very unpretentious way.

Ben Cardew:

In a way, the cover reminded me of the cover of your debut album, Belong. Not because they're similar but because they have pictures on them that aren't necessarily the kind of pictures you'd associate with house music or techno. Belong had a cycle race and here we've got three young men in a shop. I wondered if this is something you try to do consciously, to make an image that's not a robot or something more typically “techno”.

Losoul:

You might be right. For me, music was always more than just going out and getting entertained and then going home and having a hangover and then it's over. 

It's a little bit more of a - as you might have remarked from my previous answer - it's a cultural thing. You don't even have to be very intellectual about it. It's just a feeling about it. You can meet [people] from everywhere in the club and you can become friends or you can have some kind of connection or some kind of encounter. It's an open space, a kind that we don't have in many other places nowadays. So I have a basis, an associated idealism in it.

Ben Cardew:

I want to talk about the actual music in the new album. It's described as “a fluid journey through house, techno, funk, soul, jazz and early hip hop influences”. I don't think I realised hip hop had such a big influence on your work. Could you tell us about that?

Losoul:

My experience with hip hop is actually from the earlier times of hip hop culture. I was born in the early '70s, so I was a teenager in the '80s and this is actually where it [hip hop] came to Europe. I'm in Germany and I traveled a little bit in the '80s as a teenager. I also had this student exchange to the United States in the late '80s. So this is actually my hip hop experience, mainly from what I know, from the '70s to the early or mid '90s. 

This is for me like an era in hip hop, some people might even call it the golden age, but this is very individual. But this was the kind of hip hop that brought so many innovations. First, it became well known, in the '70s or '80s. Then it was bringing new technology to music culture, like electronic music, and brought it together with funk and soul, with the utopia of science fiction, with electro, then societal aspects like Black culture, white culture, brought these things together or brought it to the table. 

And then the next technical step was sampling, which was very, very close to the earlier hip-hop cultures, in the form of turntablism. So producers in the studio could use a sampler and bring things together, make citations, could combine parts of other music or earlier music that they find worth combining or worth bringing together as a new vibe…

There was a lot of dance music in the charts in the late '80s that referred to old hip hop, to sampling, to the beats they were using, the James Brown beats or the Amen break, very, very famous. This was a melting pot of options, of possibilities and of innovations, creative innovations and using the technological innovations that were new at that time. 

And it's still interesting. Nowadays there's so much studio gear that still refers to the gear that was released in the ‘80s: drum machines, synthesisers, special kinds of samplers, all these things. So this is also a connection that I have with old hip hop that brings this kind of vibe and this kind of approach, this technical approach to the music I do.

Ben Cardew:

Talking about turntablism, there is a track on the album called The Peekaboo Scratch. I was trying to work out what was going on. Is that actually scratching, or is that a sound that resembles scratching?

Losoul:

I'm not a hip hop DJ. I used to do it a little bit but I don't call myself a hip hop DJ. So it's a recorded scratch that was a little bit changed in the studio. It's a homage but it gets more abstract. There's some hip hop which is more abstract and doesn't do very much sampling of old soul and funk. 

This track, I was mainly using sounds from the modular system, so they are all synthesised. There's one famous sample in the beginning. But this is kind of a mix, an updated version. It's more a little bit of a hip hop feeling, like a weird, dark hip hop feeling, but more with the tools or with the elements of electronic tools.

Ben Cardew:

I read in an interview that you work on the principle that atmosphere is often found in the space between the sounds. How did you discover that?

Losoul:

When I started to make music, to produce, to bring sounds together, this was in the '80s. [I had] Very simple equipment, like an old Amiga computer with a tracker software and later on with this little sampling box and a little bit later an Atari computer with a real sampler, with MIDI and stuff. I found out that when you use a beat, when you use drums, when you use a bass line sound, put it together, the sounds work together. 

It's a little bit like a band. The members of a band are playing and are listening to each other and they get in the groove together. And this is actually the same as when you're an electronic music producer and you are on your own and you put the stuff together, you put elements together like the bass drum, a snare drum, a clap, a hi-hat and then a bass line sound and let them move within the mental atmosphere of music, move towards each other or take more distance from each other. 

It's always the dynamics. You have a dynamic and then you have the space to create a space, with some reverb or some delay and all these things. And it's always more than the sum of the elements. You create a mental atmosphere that might be in your head that you want to make a picture of, like a painter. You have an idea, it may be still abstract or still not really clear but you work towards it. 

And especially in music, you can also have the option of making things like… making a space, a 3D stage, bringing things together. And when the elements work with each other, it's a synergy. 

Also, music comes from a cultural background. Music is not… you just create it from zero or from Adam and Eve. You respond to a culture and to your own background with the culture. So you bring this and this is part of the music as well and you are describing this.

Ben Cardew:

You're often called a minimal house producer. I was wondering what you thought of that description?

Losoul:

When we started to do music - I say "we" like the people of my age who might be still around nowadays doing music - we - or at least myself - I wasn't thinking of calling it minimal or microhouse, as some people call it. 

You put elements together following your maybe unfinished picture and put it in a space that convinces you and at some point it matches the picture you have. And people of our age, or some producers of my generation, they probably have the habit to keep it [music] still quite reduced…

So we attempted to give it more space, to give the dancer and the listener more space; it's not meant to be a one-way entertainment. It's nice to get entertained and everything is giving you a picture and giving you a groove… It pushes you.

Ben Cardew:

You're not filling the music with everything. You're giving space for people to think.

Losoul:

To think or just feel - feel for themselves. It's not just about thinking. Sometimes you don't want to think all night.

Ben Cardew:

Could we talk about a very well-known song of yours? I'm talking about "Overland," which samples an incredibly famous song. Many years have passed, I don't know if we can name what the song is. [It’s Michael Jackson’s Billie Jean]. I’m fascinated: how did the process go that you thought of sampling something so famous?

Losoul:

It wasn't my usual habit to do this. Other stuff I did was using samples that were not so well known, or the samples got more edited so you couldn't recognise them very easily. In this case, it's a special track for me… I found the single of the original song in a flea market, in the streets [where] they buy used stuff and it was not in very good condition and you can even hear it in the sample. It's a little bit scratchy, but it was a homage.

It's actually a soul track. It has this soul vibe to it. So you have the original artist who is very famous and very rich, but I was thinking about the personal situation of somebody. It doesn't have to be especially that musician or that very famous person. It was more about people who are in a very exposed situation and have all these things in the world but there are moments in it where you still are a human being and you have your doubts and you have your struggle and you have your situations that are melancholic during your melancholic days and you have to cope with the situation. 

This famous person was - I'm sure - very conscious about [the fact] that the rest of the world wasn't in such a powerful position as he was. So it's about a holistic conscience. You have this groove and this bass line from the original that drives you and this gives you and your followers feedback, a lot of power and a lot of presence. 

But there is a parallel that is still human. This artist was also doing music that was dealing with personal ups and downs and situations in the world, and he didn't have, finally, not a very - how do you call it? - not everything ended very well. So it's part of it. It was actually a homage to a very busy and restless soul.

Ben Cardew:

And I get the impression that the scratch and the crackle on the record are very important as well?

Losoul:

Yeah because I took it and I didn't want to hide that it was a sample to people who might not have known it. It was to show that it was a citation or I was thinking, I was reacting or responding to this.

Ben Cardew:

Going back to the new record, it is your fifth album. How important, in electronic music, is the album format for you? There are some people who say that it's all about 12 inches these days.

Losoul: 

I like to do 12 inches and remixes, this is mainly music for the clubs, for dance floors. I know people who listen to this kind of music in their kitchen as well but it's actually mainly the vibe of club culture. 

And the album format, it's hard to say. In the '90s, when we were growing up as artists, there was a situation when an album gave you the option of a crossover, getting more attention from people who might not go to clubs, but listen to music on the radio. 

And so you take a wider range of styles and offer the music you're doing to a wider group of people. In the beginning, this was the interesting aspect - or this was the aspect that was offered to us as young artists. 

Then we grew into this format and we dug deeper in our ideas, in our experiences, in the ideas to express to a wider cultural room. You gain experiences when you travel, when you go to clubs, when you perform for people and there's an exchange with people, social situations, and not everything has its place on the dance floor. And the album often gives you space for longer stories or for more distinguished sequences of things that might happen. 

We have a life as well. We go shopping for food, we bring our kids to school, we do some other jobs sometimes, so life is full of things. The dance floor, for me as a producer, it's a large part of what I'm doing and of my imagery. But I have a lot of other things in life. I have a family, I meet people, I have friends, I'm in my city, I go to other cities. There's so many things that touch me and so there's a lot of things that can be processed or I can give a feedback on, I can give a response to. 

This is one of the reasons why I do albums. I offer a vision. I offer a way of approaching things after my broader experience with life and also with the scene.

Some listening

Patricia - Algal Bloom

On his new album for Balmat Max Ravitz - AKA Patricia - removed all the drums and zeroed in on simplicity, partly at the behest of his wife, for whom the album is named: Songs for Josephine. 

And I’d like to say thank you to Josephine for doing so. Algal Bloom, the album’s opening song, drifts by like the guilty pleasure of spending a holiday in bed, indulgent, irresistible and totally refreshing. The song reminds me - as these things must - of Tangerine Dream, with its simple electronic pulses and rippling layers of melody, its gorgeous simplicity like a rebuke to the gathering chatter of the modern world.

Henry Greenleaf - Whist

Henry Greenleaf’s contribution to the new Tectonic Sounds compilation doesn’t really sound like Smoke on the Water. And yet it reminds me a lot of Smoke on the Water for its killer riff, a riff so sparkling and satisfying and yet dirty and twisted that Greenleaf has the good sense to base the entire song around it, letting it rip and spiral over a beat that has shades of classic dubstep crossed with four four house shuffle. The bit without the riff is all well and good. But, trust me, you’ll spend most of your time waiting for the riff. And there’s nothing wrong with that.

Nabihah Iqbal - Heaven Can Wait

The know the utmost joy that is to be found in The Cure’s best pop songs? Where lilting bass lines run into heavenly synths and devastatingly bittersweet chord sequences? Well Nabihah Iqbal does on Heaven Can Wait, her first new music since the brilliant 2023 album Dreamer. 

Or - to be fair - it sounds like she does, anyway. No musician likes to be compared to another, obviously, and Iqbal’s deliciously restrained spoken-word vocal on this song is totally unlike Robert Smith’s blissful release. But to be compared to The Cure in pop mode is, for me, like being told you can spin gold out of your armpit. So I would take the compliment.

Inner City - Positivity feat. Steffanie Christi’an (Todd Terry KMS Dub)

Kevin Saunderson and Todd Terry have worked together before but I think this is the first time New York’s finest has remixed Inner City, which makes it a historic occasion for house heads. 

The results aren’t quite so momentous but a) it’s a dub, so what do you want? And b) it does do a very satisfying job of balancing Terry’s strident beats - few producers have ever made a drum machine sing like Todd does - with just the right amount of Inner City’s soulful vocal house to make a real dance-floor cannon, as thick and tasty as Hungarian beef.

Justice, Tame Impala, SZA & King Gizzard and The Lizard Wizard - Flower in a Hurricane

I’ve never played Grand Theft Auto (from whose imminent sixth edition this song is taken) and I am spectacularly unbothered by at least two of the names on this line up. And yet, if you’re going to flash the cash to throw together a bonkers selection of artists you might as well end up with something that sounds like Money For Nothing via 80s Fleetwood Mac via SZA via early 2000s French electronics, the totality baked in the sweetest financial honey and coming up smelling the roses. This is hit making that is simultaneously at its most odd and most terminally efficient. (See also: Olivia Rodrigo and Chappell Roan’s totally joyous Expectations, which I only haven’t included here because it really doesn’t need any more of a push.)

Some watching

Furia (season 2)

It feels like a jamon-in-the-afternoon-style cliché to mention it but there is something decidedly Almodóvar-esque about Furia (Rage, in English) Félix Sabroso’s hit HBO series, whose second season kicked off in October. Furia is typically described as a dark comedy - and it is funny at times - but there aren’t many belly laughs to be had from this anthology of female rage, which examines, quite literally, women on the verge of a nervous breakdown. 

But that’s no criticism for a series that is extraordinarily well observed, which deals with regular human behaviour taken just that little step too far. The five protagonists in series one did extraordinary things without ever stopping to be relatable, helped by fantastic work from some of Spain’s best actors. Claudia Salas gives a fantastically strident performance as Tina, an assistant who is tricked into becoming pregnant by her loathsome boss Roberto in season one, while Maribel Verdú is a stand out in season two as skin-crawling media boss Raquel, whose world appears to be on the verge of collapsing underneath her very expensive shoes.

Season one of Furia told eight different stories that would, very subtly, interact. Season two - of which I have only seen two episodes so far - picks up some of those strands but it feels like a glorious amplification, where everything is bigger, more ambitious and more gently surreal, the potentially tricky meta narrative around Tina’s story being converted into a musical series by ominous streaming platform Nucleo very well handled. Season two feels confident in its ambition, empowered by the success of season one; and already is a must watch.

Things I’ve done

Djrum - DJ-Kicks

I reviewed Djrum’s head-spinning and brilliant new DJ-Kicks for Pitchfork. “DJ-Kicks is a dense forest that offers no shortcuts, a defiant challenge that sounds impenetrably diffuse at first, only for the back-breaking work behind it to yield a fluid, even intuitive sense of purpose.” 

Line Noise 284 - Logic1000 on Balancing Parenthood, Dance Music and Crises of Confidence

For the Line Noise podcast this week, I spoke to the very charming Samantha Poulter, AKA Logic1000, about Confirmation - her new album but also a lot more - about crises of confidence, family, learning and un-learning, the relationship between parenthood and dance music and more.

The playlists

I have two playlists: the newest and the bestest 2026, which has all the best new music from this year; and the newest and the bestest, which dates right back to 2021. Both are available on Apple Music And Spotify.

Apple Music: The newest and bestest 2026

Spotify: the newest and bestest 2026

Apple Music: The newest and the bestest

Spotify: The newest and the bestest