A couple of the producers gushed about the German musician Fabian Jürgens, aka Fabitekk. He was making hardtekk long before the current boom, inspired by DJs like Die Gebrüder Brett, Eycer, and Cracky Koksberg. His tracks sometimes extend to 10 minutes, adorning the bludgeoning kick-funnels with precious dots of detail and vocal madness.
“I’m really curious what Fabitekk is thinking about us. I have a feeling he’s looking down on us, because we are sort of printing the songs out,” YXMI sighs. “Ah, that sounds so negative.”
I ask YXMI why, if he’s so bummed by the emptiness of his output, does he not simply try harder? “The industry is all about what works and what doesn’t,” he shrugs. “I have fingers trained to make songs that work, basically. I think I’m just gonna focus on these songs that are working and, next to it, when I have time, make songs that are, yeah, more in my own style.”
“I mean, I don’t want to lie. I just can’t lie,” he continues. “There’s a lot of passion in the songs that I made because the melodies are creative and born in my brain. But the kicks, the things that are working that I’m implementing in a song: They don’t have a soul in it.”
It’s a tantalizing proposition: Work on a track for a few minutes, upload it to TikTok, and maybe receive a label advance worth thousands of dollars. Who would say no? And who would waste time laboring over the fine details of a hardtekk tune, when that might just make it less algorithm-friendly? “I guarantee you if Fabitekk had a track for one minute instead of 10 minutes, he would have a million monthly listeners,” snxff tells me. “Easy.”
Fabitekk, indeed, disdains the current hellscape of hardtekk profiteering, especially the craze around hardtekk remixes of popular songs. “You can’t tell me you’re just shitting down a pattern, copying someone’s bassline, and putting it on some viral radio songs, then [saying], ‘Yeah that’s art,’” he tells me over the phone. “I don’t like the way hardtekk is going right now.”
When we spoke at 5 p.m. his time, he was a little groggy; he’d just woken up because twelve hours before, he was playing a hardtekk set in a repurposed fabric shop. Fabitekk, 24, started producing as a teen after hearing hardtekk at a birthday party. He went to a school for plumbers at the beginning of his career; he would repair pipe systems during the week and then obliterate crowds with piep kicks on the weekend. Eventually, the booking requests overwhelmed him.
It’s easy to see why he’s revered. Ditching the DAW, he devises loops and records live from his Korg Electribe 2. A perfectionist who can’t stop adjusting the tracks, he treats hardtekk as an unlikely canvas for his emotions. “Vyruz,” a six-minute song that cuts between monstrous kicks and flashes of melody, came after a bad breakup. He was startled to find that people wrote him letters saying they felt the same emotions when they listened to the wordless track.
