Chapter 1: Disco House, a love affair
It has been for 20 years that Frank Timm evolved between his 3 aliases Soundstream,
as well as his collaboration with fellow producer Errorsmith as Smith N Hack.
Frank’s first connection to music sends us back to the ’80s during the Cold War in the West part of Berlin. His mother used to have a relationship with an Afro-American soldier from the Air Force who was a fan of Stevie Wonder or George Benson and possessed a huge record collection in the same aesthetics. This soundtrack from his childhood will become the foundation of Frank’s influences as a producer and a DJ.
As he grew, Frank has been more and more attracted by harder stuff such as the techno revolution which has spread out from Eastern Berlin as the wall was no longer containing it.
This experience of Berlin’s liberation, with parties in clubs like Tresor, has been more prominent regarding his influences in shaping the signature of his Soundhack alias.
However, as the House Music scene was gaining grounds in Germany the siren song distilled by the disco samples from his childhood has brung him back to his first musical love affair.
Chapter 2: The shades of Timm
The first spotlight of his career happened in 1999 with the release of his Good Sool EP under Soundstream on the famous German label - Hardwax. Good Sool was directly inspired by disco tracks from the ’70s which gives the tone for the Soundstream project and its following releases. Motion for instance is made of tiny samples from a disco classic Cocomotion from El Coco.
Aside of Soundstream Frank has another alias - SoundHack. An echo to the process of sampling which can be seen a bit like hacking the soul of a track. SoundHack was used for more techno if not harder tracks in memory to a part of his musical roots. Yet, Frank has also another project called Smith And Hack with the artist ErrorSmith on which they release longer and experimental tracks.
These aliases give us a bit the scope of Frank’s skills to produce remarkable records on pretty much any genre. Consequently, it is not impossible that on some EP like ‘Live’ Goes On Soundstream takes some accent of the harder facet of Soundhack which create a rougher yet banging track. The eponymous track from the EP with its start and stop piano which then leads you into a warmer loop.
Chapter 3: Doctor Loop
As a prelude before becoming a DJ and starting to compose his tracks, Frank has had a long musical journey through time. One of his passion was to listen to Disco House tracks and guess from where was coming the sonorities, the samples etc. Then, once he has found he was applying the exact same chirurgical process going up through the chain of who has influenced who.
This exercise has shaped Frank’s vision of inspiration in the art of composition. According to him, it is our taste, sensibility to what we like which lead our creation exercise but at any moment someone is inventing a sound purely groundbreaking. Frank has applied this theory to production by understanding why a record was worth to be in his record box as a DJ in order to produce the perfect missile any DJ would like to play to make people dance.
Influenced by the Chicago scene, one facet of his production style is his fascination for the power of the loops entrenched in simple compositions. SoundStream’s signature is the sampling of loops which are then worked over and over to bring you on a hypnotic journey. In any way, Soundstream's discography is just pure gold and definitively worths to throw an eye on!