Sometimes you just need to be RAEDY and do the right thing at the right time. But then you just say »Thank You Have A Nice Day« and mess up the entrance. Stupid, yeah, but, hey, no stress: just drop the needle, listen to it crackle and get RAEDY! A few older cohorts from Sichtbeton and 1,599 SoundCloud followers from Prenzlauer Berg still know him as V. Raeter.
Fatoni once called him an East German hip-hop legend, and most West Germans love to hear his beats. Now we all have a new album, »Thank You Have A Nice Day«, on Kabul Fire. It sounds like New York, which is »what I always wanted to do with an album«.
Says Martin Pohle, graphic designer, photographer, musician, and RAEDY, of course. Born in a industrialized tower block, he still knows East Berlin from his childhood. In the Prenzlauer Berg of the early eighties, Dunckerstraße was his hood. Martin grew up with Amiga records, science fiction and detective tapes, discovered breakdancing at a holiday camp and ended up at »Kopfnicker«, Blumentopf and East Coast. He says, »That’s why this record is like looking at a home that no longer exists.« He adds, »Even 20 years ago, New York was a very different city to the one in the songs that I used to listen to«.
A Walk On The Wild Side
Martin went there for the first time in 2003. A few years ago, he went back to visit. He never dreamed of staying forever, as he’d joked in a half-sentence. Instead, he took lots of photos, not the usual tourist shots of Times Square or the Statue of Liberty, but real photos: side glances down side streets, artistic perspectives, the whole nine yards. »The result is a photo walk through New York,« says Martin, referring to the coffee-table book that will accompany the record. »It’s a kind of thesis I never did and a total work of art; you really have to listen to the record together with the book«.
So if you want to take a stroll around New York with RAEDY, you can now do it from the comfort of your sofa. We almost forgot that Martin has a couple of other projects in the making. Something »in the direction of uptempo« with Kabul-Fire sidekick Farhot, and there is also this »lofi house project« with Marteria pal Nobodys Face. Anyway, it’s all still in the pipeline. For now, Martin is RAEDY. Sometimes, the right moment comes along and you hear one of his mixes and you all you want to say is, »Thank You Have A Nice Day!«
