dig dis!cover: Sven from Bondage Music

How long have you been making music and how did you first meet?
I can even pinpoint a date and it was December 16, 1995 when I met Sven G. I also can tell a little story about that, because we both come from a small town in Saxony-Anhalt. At that time I wanted to go to an event and through friends I learned that Sven G. was also going there and he then took me with his car. Since then we have become friends.
Making music and DJing actually came a few years later. One of our first gigs was at Nature One, where we were DJing at the campsite just for fun and played for 7-8 hours. That was the birth of our DJ project. There we discovered for ourselves that we have a similar taste in music and that we complement each other very well.

How did Pornbugs start and eventually lead to the launch of your label Bondage Music?
Our duo wasn't always called Pornbugs, instead we had another project (called I.D.O.G. & Crypton) from 2001 to 2006, where we were more involved with the trends of techno at the time. However over time the Techno Sound in Germany had changed and with Pornbugs we wanted to express ourselves more and create a sound that has more soul in our opinion. A sound that has more groove and which moves into the house direction. I was also in Ibiza a lot during those years and got a lot of inspiration sound-wise from there.
Pornbugs and the label Bondage Music were actually created at the same time in 2006. We wanted to create a label where we could release our own music. We also wanted to give the artists we have worked with the opportunity to release their music and to give our musical sound its own platform. The name "Bondage" can also be explained by the fact that we wanted to create music with which we want to tie people up on the dance floor. We don't want to make music that is "only" meant to be listened to, it should rather be functional and work in a club. That's generally the basic idea with which we run our label.

How did you deal with so many live shows being canceled due to the pandemic and what impact did it have on your label?
Through Corona, where the live performances have declined, we have of course considered how we should continue and whether we should shift down a gear and see how the scene is evolving during that time. But in the end we decided to just keep going. We just kept releasing frequently on our label in order to offer people something during the pandemic while also giving them a sense of normality. Of course it was risky because we didn't know how it would affect the sales figures. Especially since we already noticed a slight decline in digital sales in the beginning of the pandemic. As for vinyl it was quite different: the figures actually increased and I can only explain this to myself for the simple reason that people had more time to deal with the music. For my feeling I would say that we even gained more fans from vinyl during this period. So in general we haven't experienced a drop in sales on the label.

How would you describe the sound of Pornbugs?
If I had to classify it sound-wise, then we are somewhere between deep house, minimal tech and microhouse. Generally, I would say our sound goes more in the house style.

Why did you decide to come to dig dis! with Bondage Music? How could we help you with the development of your label? 
We came to you in 2006 with vinyl, and we were right there with you when the label started. We were hesitant to distribute our music in the digital space at first because we kind of wanted people to be able to hold something physical, a vinyl, in their hands. At some point Frank (dig dis! ℅ Music Mail Tonträger GmbH founder) was able to convince us to start distributing our music also digitally, and looking back we haven’t regret that decision. It is indeed a great collaboration with dig dis! and we are very happy that we’ve got to work together.

How does your work as an artist differ from your work as a label manager and what challenges do you see in your daily label management?
I'm not only a label manager and artist, I also have a regular commercial occupation. It all works so well together because we have a team that collaborates well allowing me to hand over a lot of tasks. I think the second key-point is that I work in a super structured way. I do my planning very far in advance, for example we are already done with planning the releases until April 2023. So we are already one year ahead and all the releases are planned through. This pre-planning is also absolutely necessary as we also do vinyl and its production has to be planned as well. The whole team knows exactly about their tasks. For example, our graphic designer knows that if a release is coming in June, we then need the artwork at least 4 weeks prior to uploading it to dig dis!. 
My main tasks as a label manager are the planning of the release, the registration with GEMA and the accounting of the artists. Checking the demos is a task I share with Sven G. Furthermore I'm the main contact person for our artists and handle all of the conversations with them.

Can you tell us more about your artwork? Do colorful animals have a special meaning?
That's a question you should ask our graphic designer. *laughs* He's a good friend of ours and we met him the same year we started Pornbugs and Bondage Music. In the beginning he wasn't a graphic designer, but he drew a lot and we just asked him if he could do some artworks for us. We gave him all the freedom and he decided to draw different kinds of animals and then digitized and colored them. When new artists come to us, we also like to clarify with them what their preferences are and how we can incorporate them into the artwork. In general, our goal is to maintain the style.

What projects can we expect in 2022? 
In May we will release our 6th Deep Value compilation, for which we will also create an exclusive DJ mix. This month we will also have a new artist joining us, Christina Lazic, who we are really looking forward to. In June we will release an EP by Pornbugs. Then at the end of October Markus Homm's first artist album will be released, which is another big milestone for us and we are very excited that he will be releasing it with us. That's one of the bigger projects until the end of the year.
And yes, I still really enjoy the label work and maybe if I didn't have this "normal" job on the side, I don't know if we would still be running the label. The good thing is, we don't have this pressure that we have to earn our whole living with it and we always release the stuff that we stand 100% behind.
We don’t have this financial pressure so we've always done what we wanted to do. After more than 15 years both the label work and the DJing is still a lot of fun and the fact that it is also well received by the people is doubly good.

We want to thank Sven for the great interview and the insights in his job as a label manager. If you are also interested in sharing your story about yourself and your daily music business life with us, then please contact us anytime.

Pornbugs
https://www.instagram.com/por_nbugs/
https://www.facebook.com/Pornbugs

Bondage-Music
https://www.bondage-music.com/
https://www.instagram.com/bondage_music/
https://www.facebook.com/BondageRecords