Milk & Sugar sweeten house music
20 July, 2009 | 6.24AM
Interview written by: Kirsty Kane
Production duo Michael Kronenberger and Steffen Harning, otherwise known as Milk & Sugar, sweeten house music continuously with radio friendly anthems full of sing along moments and memorable hooks. Quite unlike the ardent underground techno producers of their home country of Germany, Kronenberger and Harning have no qualms about making pop-flavoured house, remixing pop stars, or working with major labels.
Via their self-titled record label, the pair are responsible for some of dance music’s most popular house records like ‘Let The Sun Shine’, which has been in the Beatport Top 10 for three weeks, ‘Stay Around’ (For This), and ‘No No No’. Their songs are unashamedly uplifting, and appeal to the masses in a way that few dance music producers care to explore.With new mixes of ‘Let The Sun Shine’ yet again cloaking Ibiza’s dancefloors in rays of happiness, we felt it was time to explore the afternoon pleasantries of Milk & Sugar with an interview.
You’ve stuck by your roots since the launch of your label and haven’t jumped around sounds like labels tend to do over time. Was that decision to remain consistent a business decision, or do you have a purist attitude to your music?
Michael Kronenberger: It was not a business decision at all. We would have released heavy electro house tracks if we wanted to make lots of money as that is an easy sell. To be honest, we just make and release music that we really love.
What is that exactly?
MK: It’s sexy house music with lots of vocals. A lot of what we release has Balearic influences. That’s not to say that we only like big house tracks. When we DJ longer sets, like at Pacha in Munich, we will start off deeper and then move into club focused house, before going harder and techier.
Steven 'Sugar' Harding: All of the music we make and we release is our own personal taste. There just weren’t many labels out there that had the sound we were looking for, so we launched our own label.
Why do you guys like vocals so much?
SH: I think it gets really boring if you only play dubs and instrumental tracks in a DJ set. You need songs. And for entertainment value, if a crowd can sing along to something, that’s great. As long as it doesn’t get too cheesy of course.
There aren’t many producers out there at the moment working with real vocalists.
Why do you think that is?
MK: Vocals are not that easy to do. You need really good vocalists to make it work in a song format, and also good songwriters. Making an instrumental dance track is a lot easier than making a song with vocals that have meaning. Plus for the purposes of live performance, just turning up with a bag of records is a lot easier than working with live vocalists in a club, with soundcheck and all that.
How did you guys get into vocals, if they’re so hard to do?
MK: We grew naturally into vocals. I used to go to London in the 90s, and the type of vocal house that Ministry of Sound was releasing really influenced me.
Do you guys work with songwriters a lot?
SH: Milk & Sugar productions are generally a team effort. We normally come up with the hook line and main idea for a track, and a couple of verses, and then we work with vocalists to come up with a song idea. Occasionally we’ll use songwriters to help with a hook. Sometimes a song will develop and sound great, and sometimes it will lead nowhere and we’ll have to scrap it.
MK: We start a lot of tracks and try a lot of ideas out. I don’t know any producers out there who go ‘I’m going to record a hit now’, and then just do it. Most artists have hard-drives full of work in progress. Anybody who thinks writing a house anthem is easy is mistaken.
For our track ‘You Got Me Burnin’, we spent a long time working with the vocalist Ayak to get the song right. For ‘Let The Sun Shine’, we worked hard with Lizzy Pattinson to write the track. Even though the hook line is sampled, we reconstructed it into a whole new song. It’s a question of weeks and months, not hours or days.
How do you find working in a country dominated by techno?
MK: At the beginning it was really hard. No one in Germany wanted this stuff. We produced our first record in 1996 and at that point techno was all over Germany with Mayday and Loveparade. On the other side, no major labels wanted us because we were too dancefloor. So we were in this strange place, where no independent dance labels wanted us because we weren’t techno enough, and no major label wanted us because we were too club focused.
Why do you think Germany has so few house producers?
MK: In Germany now there are a few big house producers like Mousse T. and Boris Dlugosch. Of course, the techno and minimal scene here is huge. But for some reason, a lot of the labels here stopped doing vocals and that made it hard for us to find labels to work with. That’s why we launched our own label really.
What do you think of the German techno scene?
MK: We used to be hooked on Berlin techno, but it got too boring for us and that’s when we moved into house music. It’s great that people love these cool German artists. We know many of these guys and used to party and play together with them a lot. For instance, we used to DJ with the Tiefschwarz guys when they were all about house music, before they moved into minimal.
Your music is very upbeat. Is that because you are just happy people?
SH: Yes I think so, to a certain extent. We are happy, and we make music that aims to be the highlight of a DJ set. We make prime time records that are always energetic and driving. You don’t start a set with one of our records, you build up towards it.
You’ve remixed Janet Jackson, Jamiroquai, Usher, Mya, Samantha Mumba. How do you balance that producer-to-the-pop-stars side of your work with club-focused house?
SH: We remixed all of those artists, but really we just took their vocals and layered it over the top of one of our own tracks. Most of the time it worked out, but sometimes it was really hard. Like with our Jamiroquai remix - the original was around 80 bpms. So we spent ages trying to make that vocal work on a house track. It wasn’t easy.
A lot of dance producers wouldn’t remix big pop stars for fear of losing credibility. What do you think about that?
SH: I’ve just received the Mark Knight remix of Rhianna. I don’t think remixing a pop star affects your credibility. It’s nice to have such big names on your remix discography and I think it can actually add credibility to your production history.
MK: I don’t think it’s uncool to remix Jamiroquai or Janet Jackson. They are megastars and for dance producers like us, it’s a chance to remix a great song by a major star. That ‘Corner of the Earth’ track by Jamiroquai was huge. When we were on holiday we listened to the original of ‘Corner of the Earth’ everyday and never got bored. It’s a great record. Ultimately we do what we love, and not everyone has the same tastes.
That’s a great point. Do you find your music appeals more to certain people and works better in certain countries?
MK: Our audience is certainly a bit older than the average club crowd. Not a lot of teenagers are into our music, and we have a big fanbase who are in their mid 30s. Our music is popular at after work parties for example. Countries wise, it’s pretty popular everywhere except the US. For some reason, we haven’t had much success in the US, although the first time we released ‘Let The Sun Shine’ it reached No.1 in the Billboard charts. But we’ve only ever DJed in Miami.
That’s a bit strange don’t you think, considering that the US is the home of...
MK: House music? Yeah but then we’ve realised that the US has so many great homegrown house artists like Little Louie Vega and Dennis Ferrer, so why would a promoter fork out on international flights for two guys from Germany when they can book somebody more local?
The new mixes of ‘Let The Sun Shine’ are currently blowing up.
MK: Yeah that’s great to see, of course. We are actually shooting the video for ‘Let The Sun Shine’ in Ibiza this week. We always wanted to shoot a party video for it in Ibiza, as the song was originally discovered in Ibiza before it got big.
What happened?
MK: We visited the island in 2003 and handed out a few CDs to some DJs on the island. A few weeks later we returned to find the track simply everywhere across the island. That handful of CDs that we had handed out had been copied again and again by DJs on the island. We always wanted to have a summery party video made for the record but the original video never turned out that way. It was a bit of a mistake.
What do you mean by “it was a mistake”?
MK: The track was signed to a major label and we had no say in the video that the record company made. We didn’t like the final video but there was nothing we could do. Now we are completely free of any major label and we can do what we want.
So now you can make something more edgier?
MK: Not too edgy - after all it’s our money that’s at risk now [laughs]. But we’ve found a great director who shares a similar vision to us and we’re going to get a whole bunch of cool and interesting people in the video, like transvestites and cool guys and girls. Ultimately we just want some nice pictures to match the record.
SH: We had a few directors come into our offices pitching us ideas, and in the end this guy came up with something that we really wanted. It’s a party song, so we’re going to film us partying in Ibiza with a pre party at Savana, and then later at El Divino. We’ll maybe also do some beach filming. It’ll be a lot of fun, and a few of our friends are flying out for the week.
Do you think you’ll ever work with major labels again?
SH: A couple of years ago, we were really happy to work with major labels as they take care of everything and we didn’t have the contacts to do much ourselves. Now we can do a lot. But we still need partners in different territories to help with distribution, so we may work with a major again.
You released ‘You Got Me Burnin’ recently. What’s the idea behind that track?
MK: ‘You Got Me Burnin’ is actually a record that we spent ages working on to get right. We think it could be a big record, but ‘Let The Sun Shine’ is doing so well that it’s over-rolling everything else at the moment.We released ‘You Got Me Burnin’ on Beatport, but we’re not doing any promotion for it at the moment as we want it to be a sleeper track that slowly builds in momentum as DJs slowly discover it. We’re actually thinking of taking it off the site, and then re-releasing it again with a big remix package as we feel it’ll eventually blow up.