In dance music there are people who make trends and those who follow, then those who simply set their own agenda. Red Rack’em falls squarely into the third category.
Raised in a small Scottish fishing village in a Buddhist family during the eighties, a young Danny Berman was never going to follow a normal route. A fascination with the seminal hip hop of the time – the likes of Public Enemy, De La Soul and Gangstar – Inspired him to try to understand the sampling and scratching that made those records. These early influences are still fundamental to his music, although now his work ranges from in-the-box production to working in full analogue studios.
As well as meaning he had a lot of time for experimenting with music, the isolation of his teens gave him a voracious appetite for new music as well as a ruthlessly high, cross genre quality threshold. This has gone on to define his DJ career, taking him far and wide, from Australia to Japan, across Europe and to the deepest depths of Berlin where he is now based.
These formative experiences have shaped a strong blueprint for dance music in Danny’s head. His ability to take samples and make them entirely fresh and vital in the studio shows up when every couple of years he drops a classic. Tracks like How I Program, Kalimba and In Love Again, his edit of Paradise Garage classic Stand On The World and most recently Wonky Bassline Disco Banger have gained house music immortality and reached across genres and with their unique and vibrant take on a sound.
After teaching music and DJ skills in Nottingham, UK he continued to absorb musical inspiration, not least when his students turned him on to the raw sounds of grime and the mutating sound of UK garage that gave birth to dubstep. His sets at the time took in many genres when few others were doing so, as well as staying at the top of his game for so long, over time the mainstream has slowly edged closer to him.
In 2009 after establishing a solid reputation across the UK as a DJ and producer, he was handpicked by Gilles Peterson alongside Floating Points as an upcoming talent to play at his Worldwide Awards. His peak time set alongside Jazzanova and Laurent Garnier was later broadcast on Radio One, Red Rack’em was becoming a real name to watch.
In 2010, he launched his own label Bergerac with the How I Program EP. The title track went on to become a real success; featuring in Four Tet’s Fabric compilation and leading Mike Huckaby to name a synth patch on his Waldorf ‘Red Rack’em Bass’.
After moving to Berlin in 2011, he began to establish a solid base and spread his wings as an A&R. He now runs three labels in total: Bergerac for the weirder and more banging stuff, Nettles for cheeky bootlegs/edits and Smugglers Inn, the companion to his impossibly rich radio show which is a 10 year archive of slept on hits, forgotten gems and classics that somehow never were.
Releases so far have featured early tracks from Ajukaja (pre Rare Birds), Carlos Nillmns (Planet E),
