Kruder & Dorfmeister‘s story is not just a story of refusal and renunciation. As the two started making music together in the early 1990s, there was hardly anything that the two didn’t do ‘wrong’, and therefore, exactly right.
At the time, Vienna was a metropolis of the aspiring techno movement and was active, during the initial heyday of the revolutionary style. But the two gentlemen, K&D, rather followed the tradition of the continental cosmic ‘dancefloor’ of the 1980s, which searched for a universal language of dance music, influenced by hip hop, rare groove, dub, new wave and last but not least, of music that stood out between all those categories.
As the first post-acid jazz productions of labels like Ninja Tune or Mo Wax heralded a new era, Kruder & Dorfmeister were already a step ahead of those protagonists. The sound of K&D’s groundbreaking debut ‘G-Stoned’, already apparently influenced by the elegiac arrangements of productions from the 1960s and 1970s of Afro-jazz and Pink Floyd, made many top producers begin scratching the backs of their heads, asking themselves who could have generated such an organically-flowing, complex yet subtle sound with only two Akai samplers, a Roland Space Delay and a dusty mixer.
Offers came pouring in like heavy rainfall in a mid summers day, but the two stubborn gentlemen didn’t play along: after the success of their ‘DJ-Kicks’ and ‘Sessions’ CDs, which sold millions worldwide, they turned down most of them.
