Name: Superspace
Members: Tom Hessler aka der Assistent, Maurice Summen
Interviewee: Tom Hessler
Nationality: German
Current Release: Superspace's homonymous debut album is out via Staatsakt.   
Recommendations for Berlin, Germany: Berlin is such a colorful city. Check out all the shades of grey it has to offer in winter which lasts for at least 9 months.
Thing I am passionate about but rarely get to talk about: This thing called solidarity is great.
Wikipedia says it means “awareness of shared interests, objectives, standards, and sympathies creating a psychological sense of unity of groups or classes. True solidarity means moving beyond individual identities and single issue politics. Still, solidarity does not reject individuals and sees individuals as the basis of society. It refers to the ties in a society that bind people together as one.“
I think it could be the only thing to stop oligarchy from taking over our world. All is one - in Superspace!  

If you enjoyed this Superspace interview and would like to know more about the duo and their music, visit the band's official homepage. They are also on Instagram, and bandcamp.

For a deeper dive, read our earlier Der Assistent interview.



What were some of the musical experiences which planted a seed for your interest in electronic music?

For me it started in the mid 90s on a drive to Italy with my family. My older brother put his headphones on my ears and played me “Da Funk“ by Daft Punk and “Out of Space“ by the Prodigy.

I was maybe 11 and  had never heard anything like it before.



Then the K&D Sessions came into my life through a friend. Soon many more left field artists followed, but these were the first big impacts into my child brain.

I also remember “Space Night“ on public Bavarian TV. Weird space themed random visual info and chilled trippy beats throughout the night. There must have a been some stoners at work there.

[Read our Peter Kruder interview]
[Read our Tosca interview]

Disco, house, techno, drum n bass, IDM and many other genres were about a lot more than just music. For you personally, is electronic music (still) a way of life – and if so, in which way?

It is a way to enter alternate realities.

Dystopian urban storytelling as in the Bristol sound of Massive Attack or Portishead, Kraftwerk's idea of human loneliness in a digital world — which we encounter today — Drexciya’s afrofuturist myth of a country under water populated by the unborn children of pregnant African women who were thrown off of slave ships. There is far more to these parallel worlds then getting wasted at a 90s warehouse rave, which became parallel worlds themselves.

Sadly most of these utopian subversive ideas that were experienced collectively outside of the realm of the commercial mass music industry, where assimilated by the latter. Club culture around the world mostly became a rich man’s game.

For me as a musician the "way-of-life-part" was always working on tracks and getting lost in beats anyways. That is also how we started Superspace.

Debates around electronic music tend to focus on technology. What, though, were some of the things you learned by talking to colleagues or through performing and/or recording with other musicians? What role does community play for your interest in production and getting better as a producer?

Community is still the most important thing. My friends and me share new tools and ideas all the time. That is how this project came about — Maurice and me throwing ideas in a pot and cooking them.

You can watch a lot of YouTube tutorials but the best learning happens when somebody sits next to you watching you work asking: "did you know about that shortcut …?“

What are examples for artists, performances, and releases that really inspired you recently and possibly gave you the feeling of having experienced something fresh and new?

Koze always stays fresh of course. "Buschtaxi“ is a fun take on the cultural appropriation discussion and therefore political yet entertaining.



Quasi punk. One can’t say that about a lot of dance music these days.

What kind of musical/sonic materials, and ideas are particularly stimulating for your own work right now?

We are using a lot of weird old records to sample. A lot of them do not even contain music.

What kind of musical/sonic materials, and ideas are particularly stimulating for your own work right now?

Sampling became a different game through AI of course. We can now extract stuff from whole tracks. Then again it kind of gets boring quickly, because it is so easy and the quality is still bad.

I just got out of the "Eurocrack“ (Eurorack modular synths) addiction which was fun but mainly expensive and time consuming. Now we mostly work on my DAW, with a self-made mic, a software sampler and a small MIDI keyboard.

The internet has to offer so much sound and I cannot afford all those fancy analogue synths anyways since streaming doesn’t pay. So we work like they did in the 90s — a computer, turntable, sampler, a keyboard and a mic.

Where do most of your inspirations to create come from – rather from internal  impulses or external ones? Which current social / political / ecological or other developments make you feel like you need to respond as an artist?

It is the age of anxiety. We are being fed bad news constantly to respond with our attention and precious life time.

At Superspace we try to cope with that. Like the flux compensator from "Back to the Future“ we try to make garbage into good old trippy energy.

Today, electronic music has an interesting relationship between honouring its roots and exploring the unknown. What does the balance between these two poles look like in your music?

I am mostly honoring our roots I guess. The exploring-the-unknown-part is Maurice’s job dealing with the AI world.

How do you see the role of sampling in electronic music today?

For us it is more important then ever. There is an infinite amount of stuff online and in our record shelves mostly for free.

Analogue subtractive synthesis is still nice if you have 4k-5k lying around for an undoubtedly beautiful pad sound we have heard since 1981. However I rather use AFXs DX9 presets for free in free DX software "Dexed“. Still fresh today!

What are some of the most recent innovations in sound design for you - and what are currently personal limits to realising the sounds you have in your mind?  

Of course there are geniuses around to which we do look up to. We are just some punks who — AI stuff aside — pretty much sound retro. We never did this to be innovative.

Then again I mostly listen to old and retro stuff myself. For me it will never sound more futuristic then György Ligeti in the scene from Kubrick’s 2001. And he did not have granular synthesis.



I believe innovation comes from ideas and from inside the human mind. AI until now can only copy what genius humans already did.

Nature is still the most powerful innovator. Tech is still limited until singularity hits, space is infinity.

In as far as it is applicable to your work, how would you describe the interaction between your music and DJing/DJ culture and clubs?  

There are a lot of DJs keeping it real of course. Mostly kids doing self organized raves. Kudos!

There is this meme with the devastated head saying "producer/DJ“ and the gleaming one saying "DJ/producer“. I guess that sums things up. Kind of ironic that jumping about in 2k designer clothes to a prerecorded set for an hour could pay for the year it took the person to write and produce the peak time banger.

Of course this is something we see in many sectors of society, for instance health care.

How, would you say are your live performances and your recording projects connected at the moment? How do they mutually influence and feed off each other?  

We plan on performing live sets by the end of the year. Once we crack Boiler Room we will move to Ibiza and become DJs. From there the sky is the limit. Joking of course.

We see how the first live performances will go and maybe we can draw something from it.

Even if AI will not entirely replace human composition, it looks set to have a significant impact on it. What does the terms composing/producing mean in the era of AI, do you feel?

I feel like like the AI freemium stuff Maurice brought to the table on our debut was very nice in its glitchy way. The more the AI stuff is getting "human“ it becomes unusable for us.

There was a sweet spot of uncanny-valley-vibes last year that got lost again. I guess mainly because major labels and Daniel Ek want AI to sound like the real Beatles to make more money with it. In order to finally cut out the middleman — the artists. I am pretty sure that there will be trashy "vintage“ AI plug-ins soon that bring interesting stuff to the table.

In a good Superspace session we bang out a nice track in 90 minutes. An AI is faster, of course, but until now the tracks I heard are impressively weird and somehow generic at best. Haven’t heard any bangers yet.

Of course if the app would spit out an arrangement, we could modify it to become proper. But in the same time I could just throw in some loops and do it myself …