Interview with Courtesy for Club To Club Festival

This weekend sees the eighteenth edition of Club To Club happening in Turin. The experimental music festival has over the years brought some the most interesting names within underground music to Italy. This year's line up is no exception with the headlining of the legendary experimental electronic act Aphex Twin. Club To Club has always been good at presenting a whole buffet of musical courses, from lesser known entrees and established starters, to the big main dishes and heavy hitting desserts, the program offers an eclectic and curated mix from across the world. This year beyond Aphex Twin, sees Blood Orange, Jamie XX, and Beach House as the big name acts. Among the new generation of budding stars, we find acts like Avalon Emerson, Peggy Gou, Dj Nigga Fox, and our interviewee Courtesy. Courtesy, who's originally from Denmark, is one of the most interesting DJ’s on the renewed Techno scene at the moment, with her fearless blending of styles making her push the boundaries of dance music. 

To get you in the mood for this weeks event, we had an interview with Courtesy to hear what she’s been up to and hear her thoughts on the coming weekends' event. 

 

Let us start with a quick catch up, what’s been some highlights of your year so far?

It’s been such a crazy year for me; I played my first Dekmantel Boiler Room which turned out to be incredibly fun, Nachtdigital festival in Germany was unbelievably beautiful and I cried at the end of my 9,5 hour Berghain closing set last month. I launched my new label Kulør, which is the project I’m the proudest of to date, but to be completely honest with you, the biggest highlight of the last year was reconnecting with my best friend Johanne from high school, who I also started DJing with back then. We haven’t spoken for 7 years, and I had completely given up on us ever becoming friends again. But now we live 5 minutes away from each other in Berlin, and the time I spend with her and her 2-year-old daughter here makes me happier than ever before. This year I’ve deeply learned that success is nothing if you are not sharing it with the people you love.     

Club To Club, what are you most excited about and what can we expect from you?

I actually just had a really nice conversation with the music programmer at Club to Club who told me to play the most challenging set I can at the festival. I honestly can’t remember a booker ever giving me directions, and normally it is actually frowned upon in the club scene to tell the DJ what to play because of out artistic freedom. But in this case, it’s given me the courage to push myself in a daring and fun direction that I might normally suppress a bit at a big festival. It’s made me look even more forward to playing at the festival.

How do you feel about the current state of the music scene, positives, and negatives? And what developments do you hope to see happen in the coming years?

The past years I’ve gone through a big personal development myself, searching for meaningfulness and figuring out how to be a traveling DJ in a sustainable and fun way with all the stress and parties that encompass. I think because of this, I’ve become particularly interested in mental health in our industry. I think the source of a lot of the public scandals (especially on social media) we see artists go through, and the reason why some people disappear on the way to the top, is often rooted in some version of anxiety and self-destruction. Mental health is luckily a hot topic in the music scene now, but I still experience a lot of my colleagues being lonely with their challenges because they are unaware of how many people struggle with the same things. I’m actually working on a journalistic book project, which aim is to make the people suffering realize that they are not alone and to hopefully create empathy among those who are not currently struggling with mental health. I hope that in the coming years there will be more enlightenment and understanding on this topic.                             

What's next for you label wise?

We did the digital release of Kulør 001 in October, which is a compilation of fast heart-breaking techno from Copenhagen. Right now we are waiting for the vinyl to get ready at the pressing plant. I’m particularly excited about seeing this release in physical because we spent a lot of energy on the artwork. I worked out a concept with the German photographer Fee-Gloria Groenemeyer, (you might have seen some of her work on Vogue) which was inspired by the British artist Ann Veronica Janssens stunning Aquarium installations, which she started exhibiting in 1992. Besides shooting the cover art Fee-Gloria Groenemeyer also shot the poster which you get with the release, when we sell out of the first pressing of the vinyl, we will change both the artwork and the poster for the repress.

 

For a chance to catch her set and any of the other great music at this year's Club To Club festival: 

Aphex Twin, Iceage, Blood Orange, David August, Vessel, Leon Vynehall, Robin Fox, Serpentwithfeet, Tirzah, Yves Tumor, with sets by Peggy Gou, Avalon Emerson, Elena Colombi, Silvia Kastel, Bienoise, Mana, Primitive Art, Gang of Ducks and Palm Wine and more. 

Get your tickets here now.