Listen to Paul Kalkbrenner’s 3-part ‘Back to the Future’ mix seriesPaul Kalkbrenner

Listen to Paul Kalkbrenner’s 3-part ‘Back to the Future’ mix series

Paul Kalkbrenner is, by definition, a living legend of our scene. The Berlin techno giant has been winning over crowds since the late ’90s, and shows no signs of slowing down anytime soon. Earlier this year, Kalkbrenner broke ground by becoming the first pure techno act to perform on Tomorrowland’s main stage. Outside of the accomplishment, he’s continued to make homage to his minimal techno roots through a well-received mixtape series titled Back to the Future.

The series serves as Paul’s history of electronic music arriving in Berlin, and captures a brief but significant window between 1990 and 1993. To create the mixtapes, Paul dug up 5,000 songs from his childhood — mostly via YouTube — refurbishing many of them for his 3-part series. The tracks span everything from trance, to techno, to breaks, and are mixed together fluidly by Kalkbrenner himself.

Last week, Kalkbrenner unveiled the final leg of Back to the Future. Listen to the full trilogy below, with a special message from Paul describing the endeavor:

Over Christmas 2014 I needed a break from recording
my album, searching online for a song I recalled from
my youth, I fell into a rabbit hole of thousands of
YouTube playlists and posts, rediscovering the songs
my friends and I would gather and listen to as
13 & 14 yr olds every Saturday in East Berlin on Radio DT64
(now Berlin’s Radio Fritz).

I stumbled back to the future, collecting over 5000 songs
on YouTube, learning for the first time the artists behind
the songs we heard almost 25 years ago.

The forthcoming trilogy is the result of 18 month
of building edits from YouTube recordings and stitching
them together off-line. I could not include every song,
nor indeed even the entire tracks from this small period
until 1993, so this is my personal history of electronic
music arriving in Berlin.

This trilogy will not be sold, it was a labor of love,
born of nostalgia and made for sharing.

Paul

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