Techno was created and developed far away from the mainstream. The underground sound got its deserved popularity in the past few years but there is a lot of movement in sound with sub-genres and a lot of talent you may not hear about.
We believe underground producers and labels deserve special recognition, so we will be dedicating our new feature series to this cause.
This week we will have a look into the underground scene in the Netherlands and the artist who were active on the scene in the 90s.
André Walter also known as Stigmata started his career as a producer in the early eighties. Influenced by artists from that time he pursued electronic music in the search for limitless ways to manipulate sound.
After some time the requests to support various musicians, DJs and artists as a producer became more frequent, and his releases got published on well known labels.
In 1994 he ran into Chris Liebing at the popular record store Downtown Records in Giessen, where famous DJ’s and acts had their meeting point. That’s how they started cooperating, which would go on for years.
To create a platform to put out their own tracks and productions, André Walter, Tommy Bingel, Toni Rios and Chris Liebing launched SOAP Records. Besides the well working cooperation with Chris Liebing, André also produced tracks with Monika Kruse, Thomas Krome, Moguai, Umek, Marshall Jefferson, Massimo, Gayle San, Al Faris, Marco Cannata and Frank Lorber.
In 1998 André began to intensify the coproduction with Chris Liebing besides the SOAP project, new labels AUDIO, CLR and CLAU were born. André’s disposition for the deep and gloomy and his passion for horror movies had a deep impact on the AUDIO follow-up-project STIGMATA, which has played a major role in the development of modern techno. With STIGMATA André could not only show his almost endless pool of creativity, but also his passion for myths.
The extraordinary prolific cooperation with Chris Liebing resulted in the winning of the “Best Producer Award” at the German Dance Awards 2001, followed by countless successful productions like the conceptual Chris Liebing record “Evolution”, Remixes of “Blood Angel” by John Starlight, “Sunglasses at Night” by Tiga, “Breakthru” by Sven Vath and “Seven Nation Army” by the White Stripes, to name but a few. Andre always breaks new ground and puts innovation into practice.
