Every so often a DJ or producer comes along who inspires the collective imagination.

Via his DJ sets or his productions on labels like M_nus, Cadenza, Ovum, Four Twenty and Cocoon, he merges perspectives in his delicate sense for sounds and reflective atmospheres, underpinned with solid, physical grooves inspired by the hip hop that was his early sonic stomping ground in the mid- to late ‘90s. There’s something there for the dreamers, as well as for the 9-to-5ers who just want to lose everything in a moment of abandon on the dancefloor.

Don’t think that merging of perspectives is accidental. This Loco Dice, with his mercurial temperament, may let his thoughts run away with him, but he tends to chase those ideas and make them into an artistic reality. His DJ sets, whether at Germany’s biggest rave Timewarp, Cocoon in Ibiza or a beach party in South America, are spontaneous orchestrations fueled by the nuances of a night/venue/crowd. He began a fruitful studio partnership with Martin Buttrich in 2002 leading to tracks like Phatt Dope Shit, MeninaBrasiliera, and Seeing ThroughShadows, and Dice meticulously plans these productions.
It’s a directorial, cinematic outlook, which permeates Dice’s everyday life, and comes not just from the outlandish escapades and scrapes that he has sometimes found himself living out in real life. It also stems from elaborate film scripts imagined as a young Loco Dice on the streets of Flingern in Düsseldorf and the Kerkennah Islands in Tunisia. This continues to be a habit of Loco Dice’s today: to close his eyes for just one minute, and see a whole cornucopia of scenes and atmospheres.

As one manifestation of this, visitors to Düsseldorf were early 2008 able to see an exhibition of photographs taken by Loco Dice & Martin Buttrich during the year they spent in New York City to work on the Loco Dice album. It’s an album that re-imagines the soul of a city, built from careful observations of urban tribes that crisscross and sometime...