Sometimes the creative process is exhausting and tedious, requires many sacrifices, and numerous hours spent in the studio. Another time, it’s the complete opposite – and then the hardship is replaced by ease, pleasure, and pure joy of creation. There is no denying that the second scenario – the much brighter story – is behind Chris Liebing’s first fully solo album.
The result is also very important, but if we don’t enjoy what we do, what can we expect of the result? asks the undisputed legend and one of the European techno pioneers, and the answer is best sought on his new LP. The album “Evolver” will be released on March 27th on Chris’s label, CLR – and on the occasion of his upcoming performance at Warsaw’s Smolna, the artist shared with us a lot of beautiful & strongly inspiring stories behind it.
The “Evolver” album is available in pre-order!
Agata Omelańska: Hello Chris, pleasure to have you here at U. I’m very glad that you’re coming to Poland again – and I would like you to know that you’re always welcome here! – and that you found time for an interview.
We are talking about a very special, even groundbreaking moment in your career – your first solo techno album that will be released on March 27th. Congratulations, I am very impressed with this new music – and my first question might be quite unusual, as it’s about words. Where did the title “Evolver” come from and what is the story behind this album?
Chris Liebing: I have always loved the concept of an album as a vehicle to express more than what you could do with a simple 12” release, even though in this case, we are talking about club techno and obviously, when it comes to my last two releases on Mute Records. I always felt that an album should represent some deeper meaning. The first techno album that I co-produced together with Andrew Wooden back in the early 2000s, which was released on CLR in 2003, was called “Evolution”, because I have always been very, very, very, very interested in not only the biological but also the philosophical side of our evolution and where we are going as humans.
The two albums on Mute contained many of those philosophical references, while ‘Evolution’ was literally about evolution, as reflected in the track names. So, with ‘Evolver’, I wanted to continue to dive deeper while I was doing a club record, and I felt that I had evolved on so many levels over those past twenty or twenty-five years in my role as a techno DJ and producer that I was actually able to put my thoughts into music.
Every one of us evolves on our own path at our own pace,
and for me, something had unfolded, as alluded to in “Unfold,” another name for a track on the album. I felt that “Evolver” was a better description of what my personal journey reflects.
By many, you’re considered to be an icon, a pioneer, and one of the most important figures of the techno genre. With 30 years on the scene, an impressive amount of releases, gigs, remixes and experience in this industry, you still dared to do something for the first time. How did you approach this challenge, and what motivated you on your way to achieving your goal?
I started thinking about a new album already two years ago, after the release of the last one I did together with Ralf Hildenbeutel on Mute Records called “Another Day”. I knew early on that I wanted to go back to my techno roots, because the Mute albums were intended to be more of a listening journey, and I felt like I wanted to do a club album. This very much reflects the moment in which I am in my life when it comes to techno music and the point to which I have evolved, to repeat a little bit of my answer to the first question.
I knew I wanted to make a techno album, and I knew I would do it alone.
A part of the reason for that was that I had moved to Switzerland and built myself a really, really cosy, nice studio where I love to work and experiment. My new life here in Switzerland enabled me to spend a good amount of time on the mountain, in nature, yet also surrounded by all my equipment and electronics, turning what I had experienced during the day into music at night. So that was kind of the process over one and a half years, and how this came together.
It manifested quite organically. There was never really a bigger plan behind it. I basically did whatever I felt like and what I thought I had to do on certain days at the studio. At some point, I had a few projects together that started to make sense to me, and they assembled into the final album you can hear now.
Although “Evolver” is your solo album, you invited many interesting guests to collaborate on it, including Luke Slater, Speedy J, The Advent, Terence Fixmer, Pascal Gabriel, Daniel Miller and Charlotte de Witte. How did you find working with your good old friends and those you’ve been collaborating with for the first time?
It all came together very naturally. Over the past two or three years, I have been playing a lot of sets with Luke Slater and Speedy J as Collabs 3000, and we have been working on music together. Speedy J and I had a Collabs 3000 release on Novamute. While we were in the studio, I told him I was working on my new album and asked if he would like to have a little session with me, and this is how our track came about. There was never a proper plan behind it. Luke Slater gave me a bit of an acid line for an intro when we played together, and I said that we should turn that into a track, so we did that. With Terence Fixmer, Daniel Miller and Pascal Gabriel, I go on a winter holiday trip to Austria once a year, where we take our modular equipment and other gear and just record stuff. So this is what we did there, and I took those recordings into my studio and made a track out of them.
I asked Charlotte because I really wanted to continue the musical connection that we have had for many, many years. We did the first release on her label, KNTXT, together, so I had the honour of starting this great label with her. When it came to making this techno album, I wanted a proper acid track, and it was very natural for me to ask her if she would want to be part of it. And Charlotte jumped on it and came up with this awesome acid line, awesome vocals, and an awesome track structure that we both formed into the final version.
It was a very easy, chill way to work with all those artists. Everything was very unproblematic, just how music should be. It was somehow all coming together without much effort.
I think that this is the most beautiful thing about this album. It was an extremely pleasant experience.
Not only musicians contributed to this album – also representatives of other art forms added some part of themselves into it. Studio Bergfors, your long-time collaborator, was responsible for the design and visual side, while legendary photographer Anton Corbijn did the photoshoot for you. What does this collaboration mean to you, especially in terms of photography? What moment in your life and career has been captured in the photos?
I could give you a two-hour-long answer to this question because it´s very deep and complex. Mute Records and my love for this label and its releases, especially for those of Depeche Mode, plays a big role in this.
Music doesn’t stand on its own; it is an art form that works so well with other art forms,
like, for example, artworks.
Studio Bergfors has done a lot of artwork for Mute Records and for Depeche Mode in the past as well. I have been working with them very, very, very successfully for a few years already. They did the artwork for my last album, “Another Day” and it was honestly the idea of my manager, Roland Leesker, who said: “Hey, you have all this stuff going on, you have this connection with Mute, if we need new pictures of you, why don’t we ask Anton?”
And I said, “Really, Anton, do you really think that he would take pictures of me?”. I mean, Anton is one of the most respected photographers in the music industry, and he is not only a photographer but also an art director and a multi-faceted artist who did most of the videos for Depeche Mode, artwork for U2, he photographed everybody from David Bowie to – you name it… Thanks to Mute, we got in touch with him, and he was available. It was an incredible experience to work with him. We had two days in Belgium, where we did the photo shoot for this album, and it was completely organic and natural. Great old stories shared, lots of laughs, and just a really amazing process.
I think that the actual process of making something is so important, it´s basically what it´s all about.
Of course, the result is also very important, but if we don´t enjoy what we do, what can we expect of the result?
The result might entertain people, but is there any fun, any love and joy? That´s kind of the way I want to work. I want to have fun doing what I do and not do it only for the sake of getting a final product. It is about the joy of making them.
And coming back to my album, if I may add that, you could sit down and just put some prompts in AI, and you have an album. But is that fun to do? No. I had so much fun working with my equipment and just sitting here and not really thinking about “Will this ever be a release? Will this make it on the record?”. No thoughts like that were ever present. It was just like “I am enjoying what I am doing, let’s see in half a year if this is material that I could put on the album.”
So, that moment in my life has been captured in those photos, and that artwork, and it is so incredible to see it all come together. I have to be immensely thankful to everybody involved for organising and doing this.
So many artists contributed to the creation of “Evolver,” and each of them has their own style, character and energy. What was the most interesting, memorable or funny story that happened during the process? Or what was the most valuable lesson that you’ve taken from it?
Well, one of the most valuable lessons that I have taken from it, I have already explained in my previous answer. Enjoy what you are doing. There are always solutions to everything. Sometimes you disagree on things, and you might not get what you want, but maybe what results from the process instead might be even better than what you could have ever thought of.
I could tell you a lot of stories about those collaborations because all of them were really fun, but if you want me to pick out one story, I will tell you the one with Luke Slater. He gave me this acid intro, I worked a track around it, then I sent it over to him, and he was like: “Yeah, that’s nice, but isn’t it missing something?” . And I said: “Yeah, something is missing. Could you work on this?”. At this point, it was still late summer, and I was sitting in the garden of friends here in the mountains, and I asked him if he had time to go to the studio. He said, “Yeah, I am at the studio”, so I just sent him voice messages like “There is this part of 32 bars in the track, can you think of an acid line for it?”. And then he basically sent me a voice note back with an acid line, and I said: “That’s sounds great, can you send it over?”. And then he kept working on it while I was sitting in the sun, sipping beers in my friends’ garden, sending him voice messages and giving him some advice, until he finally sent me the finished part. By the time he sent it over, I just took the file and put it into a new audio file in my Ableton session, and it was spot on.
I didn´t really have to mix much or do much in order to make it work. I was like, “That was very efficient and somehow effortless!”.
Those kinds of things are just beautiful and seem to happen when you are completely in the moment, and you have full trust in the process.
Which of the tracks is the most important to you? Which one did you devote the most energy, resources, technical skills, or… the most freedom, fun, and flow to?
You know, there are 13 tracks on this album, and 4 of them don’t have a straight beat. I couldn´t tell you which track is more important to me than the others. They all have a very special meaning to me, because each of them has a great story about how they were created, especially the ones with collaborators.
But if there is a track I would like the listener to listen to very intentionally, it is the final track, “Endtrack”. I am not a very musical person, and I have a difficult time with my keyboards, yet I was playing around with my synths, and somehow these melodies came together. I just added layer on layer, and since my theoretical knowledge is quite limited, I was wondering whether I could really do this and whether it was actually possible. But it sounded okay to me, so I just trusted my gut instinct.
Actually, I would suggest that each listener start with the first track and listen to the whole album. I wanted to keep it to a nice listening pace, so the whole album is not longer than one hour and five minutes. “Endtrack” is also a little bit inspired by “Endsong” by The Cure, not really musically and I would never dare to compare myself to Robert Smith, but his album “Songs From A Lost World” is one of the most amazing albums that came out in the recent years and I was amazed by the last song “Endsong”, so I created “Endtrack”.
“Rooted in the true school, dark, sweaty techno sweat pits of the world” – I couldn’t have imagined a better description of this album. What does style mean to you, in terms of both DJ-ing and music production?
To me, it means getting down to the basics. We are animals on this planet that dance to a rhythm. And if the rhythm becomes so basic that everyone can agree on it, it’s a unifier of cultures that transcends everything, yet you want to have a groove that stays interesting even though it´s basic.
So on the one hand, you have to be as minimal as possible to get people dancing to a beat, but on the other hand, you need to be as interesting as possible to keep them.
You can´t just run a bass drum with a tom loop in the background for five minutes, as people would lose interest. You want to
keep it simple while still keeping everybody interested.
And that is techno for me. That is my goal in DJ-ing. You minimize everything else around it that might distract your senses. You just have some strobe lights and some fog, and you create an atmosphere on the dance floor that lets people get lost yet feel everything around them.
That is what this style means to me. You are in a foggy room with stroboscopes and hammering kick drums, and you feel whole and present and in the moment. You feel united with everyone else.
When I listened to “Evolver” LP for the first time, I was highly impressed by its complexity, conceptualism and the legacy of legendary clubs of the 90s: Berlin’s Tresor and Frankfurt’s Omen. Thank you for honoring their spirit and music on this album! And looking at the past, how would you define your sense of belonging to the electronic scene and clubbing?
All these places you mentioned were created for everyone to be together and enjoy their time without judgment, prejudice, an open mind, and peace and love. As overused as it may sound, it´s about “unity”. We feel united with everyone around us. We are social animals; we want to dance to a beat, and I think that this is the essence of the electronic music scene and clubbing for me.
Okay, let’s leave Germany for a moment and take a visit to Poland – you’re always welcome in our country and I hope you feel it during your gigs. In February you’re playing in Poznan’s Tama and Warsaw’s Smolna. In your opinion, what’s the strongest point of the Polish electronic music scene? What and who should we be most proud of?
I think Poland should be incredibly proud of its techno landscape and its festivals, like Mayday and Audioriver,
to name a few. All the amazing clubs like Tama in Poznan, where I just played last weekend. It was absolutely amazing, the spirit of the people, the fun that everyone brings, it is so special in Poland. There are other countries that went through phases, where they had a minimal phase or this phase or that phase, but Poland, for some reason, has always been a huge techno country. And having this, and allowing your people to do it in those beautiful clubs and places, is something to be proud of. You have created an environment where this is all still possible. I always love coming back to Poland, and I can´t wait to be at Smolna.
Last but not least: it’s 2026 in the electronic music industry. What was most important in the roots of club culture, and what have we forgotten today?
This answer would also require a whole podcast. Where have we gotten? I think we have lost a little bit of the ability to give people the choice to find out for themselves what they like and what they don´t. Today, you are bombarded with so many flashy things that you get distracted, and it´s much harder for kids today to find their own way and not be influenced by what others think is good for them or by the most popular or viral thing at the moment.
There is so much pressure on everybody. I am not saying that we did not have pressure back in the days, but we weren´t bombarded with so much news and information on a daily basis, which our nervous system isn’t used to. So I think, in that sense, going clubbing has actually become increasingly important to find what I would call “islands of disconnect from the constant noise”.
And I think we are on the right track to rediscover the essence of our scene. We have lost it a little over time, when things became so commercial that most big festivals that were very well curated for music had basically to – and I can´t blame them – switch to booking the biggest hype acts. It was not really about music anymore, as they had to sell tickets, it´s as simple as that. And the people they sell the tickets to, you can´t blame them either, because they don´t have the time or the choice. They have choices, but they don´t even know where to look anymore for what they actually want and like. It is kind of a process we got into where the machine gets fed by whoever profits the most from it. The culture and the music stay behind, and I am really happy to see lately many people in the clubs closing their eyes and not touching their phones, just being themselves.
One of the biggest things we have lost after 2007 was our privacy in clubs. Kids today have it much harder to let loose because you never know when you get filmed, and you never know who´s gonna post something about you.
And that´s why I think we need to create more and more safe spaces where you can be sure no one is filming you and dance like nobody is watching.
That is very important, and I think we have lost it a little bit along the way.
But I see a big counter-movement going on, and I love this. Personally, I obviously like festivals, but I see myself playing more and more in those nice little sweaty clubs to a crowd willing to go one step further and leave their phones behind. I think more and more of us are ready to do so and not be controlled by whoever controls this media.
Thank you so much for the interview, Chris! It was a pleasure to talk to you, wishing you all the best and see you on Smolna’s dancefloor very soon!