If Ben Rau has a knack for getting to the heart of what the dancefloor wants and needs, it’s because he’s spent more than his fair share of time on it. With releases on labels including Knee Deep in Sound, his own INKAL imprint and the iconic BBE Music , plus gigs all over the world everywhere from Amnesia to Glastonbury, BPM to Pitch Festival and a previous Fuse residency, his is a dancefloor journey that is decades in the making.
If Ben Rau has a knack for getting to the heart of what the dancefloor wants and needs, it’s because he’s spent more than his fair share of time on it. With releases on labels including Knee Deep in Sound, his own INKAL imprint and the iconic BBE Music , plus gigs all over the world everywhere from Amnesia to Glastonbury, BPM to Pitch Festival and a previous Fuse residency, his is a dancefloor journey that is decades in the making.
Born in Berlin and raised in the countryside of North Germany, he first fell for music listening to the likes of Michael Jackson and Issac Hayes on American Forces Network Radio before discovering hip hop in his early teens.
“Where I grew up in Germany, there weren’t that many black people around,” says Ben “So I think I was always looking for role models to follow in music.”
With an older brother who was already into electronic music, by the mid ‘90s, Ben found himself at the heart of one of the most exciting moments in musical history, as Berlin opened up to the sounds of house, techno and trance in the wake of the Berlin wall falling.
“First of all my older brother would bring back tapes of Sven Vath’s radio show,” says Ben. “And then we started going out in Berlin. The city was absolutely popping off by the mid-90s with the wall coming down, and there were so many derelict properties in East Berlin that people were turning into rave venues.”
Already an avid record collector, Ben headed to the UK to study in Bournemouth, and found himself learning to DJ on a friend’s decks and beginning to put on parties in the city as the UK house scene flourished and UK garage started to break through.
“By the time I learnt to DJ, I’d already been a raver for six or seven years and it just became an addiction for me,” says Ben. “New vinyl would be arriving on my doorstep every day and I was spending all of my time and money on it.”
Eventually moving to London in the mid-2000s with a steely determination to make it as a DJ, Ben won a mix competition in dance music magazine IDJ, judged by Nic Fancuili, before beginning to pick up gigs and make a name for himself in the capital.
“At the time, the minimal sound was starting to break through with people like Ricardo Villalobos and Richie Hawtin becoming massive,” says Ben. “And I was always buying all of the records from the German labels that not everyone in London had. Nic Fancuilli told me he loved my mix but the thing that frustrated him was that he couldn’t work out where half of the records were from.”
As the minimal sound began to spread through London and the UK, Ben teamed up with Enzo Siragusa to play ‘a small party in a pub in Clapham’ before eventually becoming a resident at Fuse in 98 Feet East as Enzo’s brand began to grow.
With the Fuse brand becoming a phenomenon, Ben decided it was time to focus on learning to produce too, initially working with Justin Drake of Peace Division before heading back to Berlin in the mid-2010s and investing in his own studio space.
“Both my parents had passed away at that point and I realised I had all these big dreams and ambitions, but I wasn’t going to fulfil them unless I applied myself.”
Inspired by the book The War of Art, Ben began to keep the partying in check and stick to a stricter work regime.
“It was slow to start but after a couple of years of turning up to the studio day in, day out, I was getting some traction” says Ben. “I headed back to London to play Fuse and played loads of my own tracks. During the set people were constantly coming up to me to ask what I was playing and it was always my own tracks».
Launching label INKAL in 2016 to release his own music (followed by Meta to release music by others), Ben’s releases quickly gained attention, with his vinyl releases quickly selling out and digital releases reaching the upper echelons of the Beatport charts including a No.1 in 2020 , plus earning plaudits from DJs including Seth Troxler and Darius Syrosian. In 2020 he released ‘The Player’, his first release on Hot Since 82’s label Knee Deep in Sound which hit number two on the overall Beatport chart and he follows that up in 2022 with his debut album for Knee Deep in Sound, a groove-laden affair with shades of classic French filter house Breakbeats Deep and Melodic House, as part of their 8-Track series.
“Making this album really liberated me, creatively” says Ben. “It was made during the pandemic and not playing clubs allowed me to expand my sound and bring more musicality in and make something that works just as well at home as in the club. There’s so much emotion in these records and I can’t wait for people to connect with it.”
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