“Back in ’95 I was into hip hop. One by one, all of my friends started rapping and there was a great deal of peer pressure for me to go and show off my lyrical skills as well. But no way was I going to grab a mic, so I thought I’d get myself a pair of decks instead. The plan was to become the greatest DJ of all time, so nobody would ever talk to me about rapping anymore.”
Obviously at the age of 15 my budget must have been around 300 francs (which is the equivalent to 7.5 Euros today). So I got myself a summer job working at a milk factory which was absolutely exhilarating, as you can imagine. They paid 120 francs an hour (3 Euros). So, after a month I had enough to buy myself a JB System turntable and a crappy old Gemini mixer. I didn’t quite have enough to buy the second deck yet, so for the first 6 months I was using only one deck to DJ, which was interesting as well.
We had no record shops in Luxembourg, or at least none that would sell hip hop vinyl. So as often as I could, I took the train to Brussels to buy records. Most of the time I was there hours before the shops would even open. I spent a lot of time sitting in front of these shops waiting for the shutters to go up.
Years later I got into drum and bass, but you still couldn’t get much vinyl in Luxembourg. I’d drive to Germany every two weeks or so to spend an entire day in record shops. As soon as I got home I’d stay up all night mixing the new records I had acquired.
Buying and playing records was what I was living for. I simply couldn’t get enough of it. At school, I would even write down possible mixes to try out later at home.
Nowadays I teach DJ’ing to kids and it is practically impossible to make them understand what those trips abroad meant to me. For them music is just something you rip from YouTube.
When I tell them that they are stealing from artists, they look at me like I’m crazy. “Why would you even consider paying for music? My mother showed me how to do this, you can do it too!”
I miss the days where buying one song could make you happy for weeks, if not months.”
—Philippe Schirrer
Monophona’s debut album The Spy is out now.
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