Ascending from self-proclaimed studio hermit playing the occasional EDM mash-up at the local rural discotheque to headlining events all over Europe, making a splash over the pond in Canada, ticking Rampage Open Air, Let It Roll and soon even Drumsheds off his ever-shrinking bucket list – we really do need to talk about Michael Schlechtinger, the man behind Blooom.
By 2023, the humble German’s climb to the top was already well in motion, with previous appearances on platforms like Liquicity, NoCopyrightSounds, Viper, Hospital, and High Tea, but when he took to reworking Eurythmics‘s 80’s anthem ‘Sweet Dreams’ and DNMO‘s and Wolfy Light Latin-fusion ‘Bombalaya’ into dancefloor-melting bangers in their own right, the nowadays Leipzig-based talent quickly found himself not just on USBs of Andy C and basically the entirety of the scene, but also in every Spotify playlist under the sun, on UKF, NUFORM, and Helix, and recently even in Let It Roll‘s Top 10 tracks of 2024.
To celebrate the cinematic journey through time and rave that is his STORIES FROM THE RAVE EP on Pilot Records, we sat down with him shortly after his Rampage Open Air debut, for a long overdue talk.
Hey, how are you?
I’m doing great. I’d say I’m currently a little festival-stressed. Of course, there is a lot of stuff happening all at once. The EP is out. Several things are coming up that I still have to work on in parallel – it’s a good kind of busy, I’d say.
How does it feel to have finally released your biggest body of work so far?
I’d say it’s a mix of emotions. On one hand, I’m super happy it came out the way it did. I spent almost two years of my life thinking about nothing else every single day, and that was this EP. I must’ve written at least 50 songs for it because I had to rewrite and change so much. Every song went through a transformation, and many were thrown out.
It feels liberating to have it done, but at the same time, you’re giving away something you protected and refined for so long. Now it’s out in the world, and anyone can form their own opinion about it. That makes me feel a bit vulnerable, honestly. So it’s a mix of pride, vulnerability, and also a bit of emptiness. Now I have to find myself again.
Did the process of writing and rewriting the tracks come from needing to find the right Stories From The Rave for this project?
Yeah, the whole thing went through several phases over two years. First, you develop the basic idea. I only really understood the whole “rave” concept quite late in my life – I didn’t grow up with drum & bass around me. So I thought, how cool would it be to tell my own story and those of my peers in a drum & bass EP that isn’t just a string of singles, but actually has a coherent storytelling arc, so others might connect emotionally with it too.
From the start, the project was called Stories From The Rave, and the first songs developed from that. The more I learned about the rave scene and its history, the more I realized what the essence of it is for me. The deeper I went, the more everything led back to The Prodigy. That became the arc the EP needed to follow – from the origin of the scene to my own personal and unique experiences. Combining those two worlds. Does that make sense?
Definitely! It really comes through.
That Prodigy influence – that’s what really drove me. I kept imagining: “What if Skrillex, Joyryde, and The Prodigywere all in the studio with me?” Even if they didn’t specifically make drum & bass, I wondered how it could sound. They’re some of the coolest acts in the rave scene! When you’re in the crowd at one of their shows, it feels like the coolest thing in the world – even if everything’s falling apart in that moment.
What’s been your favorite or most unforgettable rave memory in the still relatively short time you’ve been in the scene?
Oh. Let me think. There are of course a lot of positive ones – and some negative too. Want me to tell a funny one? I’ve thought a lot about this in the past years, especially since I asked others about their own rave memories while working on the EP. Probably the most memorable moment was the first time I ever went raving: Liquicity Festival 2018.
One of my first drum & bass tracks was ‘Rush’, which came out on Liquicity, and I had also made a Cardi B bootleg back then. That was my first year doing D&B. After ‘Rush’ dropped, my friends got me a Liquicity ticket for my birthday. I thought, “Oh no, I’m not sure if this is my thing.” I didn’t listen to D&B much. Sure, I loved making it, but maybe it’d be totally lame in real life. Plus, several days in a row? I wasn’t a big partygoer.
But then I went, we camped – also my first festival ever – and then Julian from Polygon just randomly walked by. My friends, who knew I hated drawing attention to my artist alias, had intentionally put up a giant Blooom flag to annoy me. I was lying in front of the tent when Julian showed up – we still have a photo of it – and he said, “Wait, aren’t you Blooom? Is that you?” At first, I made a friend go out and talk to him because I was too shy. But eventually, I introduced myself. He said, “We thought you were a Fox Stevenson alias!” Apparently ‘Rush’ sounded a lot like that. And then the song was playing on multiple stages simultaneously. I was like, “Dude, what?!”
Everyone was super nice to me. That’s when I thought: Maybe this is something I want to come back to more often. It opened a book I hadn’t had access to before, and the people made me want to stay. That’s something I hadn’t realized: it’s the people who make the rave scene great.
It really is a thing – that first rave. Even if you already like the music, hearing it live and being there with the people, in that atmosphere… it’s wild.
Exactly! It helps you understand the whole thing better. This EP in particular isn’t really made for streaming I think. It’s built more for my set, for the world I want to create. And when you’re actually at a rave, it all makes sense.
Stories From The Rave, for the rave, basically! So let me jump back in time a bit. How did you even get into music production? Did you have musical training or go to music school? Take us back!
No, not at all. I didn’t grow up in a musical household. My parents aren’t musicians. I don’t think I had any musicians in my friend group growing up. I think I was around 13 or 14 when my sister started listening to EDM online, and I thought, “Whoa, what’s this stuff? This is insanely cool!”
I bought DJ Hero and loved the idea of doing live mashups. You can still find those mashups on YouTube – some of it still slaps, honestly. Then I bought two turntables and practiced live mixing with Traktor. I thought DMC was awesome. I started DJing EDM at school parties and local events. But living in a village, I realized people only wanted to hear that for like an hour. After midnight, I’d have to switch to schlager. I got frustrated and eventually thought, “Screw it, I’ll just make my own stuff. Maybe then people will want to hear that.”
So I locked myself away and produced away for like five or six years. Then out of nowhere, Liquicity asked me in 2021: “Hey, want to play Liquicity Rotterdam?” After basically two panic attacks, I re-taught myself how to DJ. And I got totally sucked into it again. I’d never really had that experience before, so I thought – alright, let’s go.
You said you started with EDM mashups. How did you end up in drum & bass?
As far as I remember, I never really listened to it actively. I had a rough idea of what it was – I knew Pendulum, for example, and loved them. I remember thinking ‘Slam’ by Pendulum was absolutely amazing. But I didn’t really think of it as a whole genre with more behind it.
Then I started listening to Fox Stevenson, who, in my opinion, makes super accessible music for someone coming from EDM. It’s poppy, uplifting, and gives you the same feelings EDM and even trap used to. Plus, he’s always done multi-genre stuff. So I thought, hey, maybe I’ll try making some drum & bass style EDM.
I made two or three tracks, and they all got picked up. Then Liquicity booked me after the EP. Then I got a manager. And I kept diving deeper into the scene. Eventually I realized – I don’t even like the stuff I made two years ago anymore. Now I’m way more into deep, techy stuff and neuro and all the subgenres. Way more interesting than the surface-level stuff. I’m still exploring. Maybe in three years I’ll just be making sine waves. Who knows.
Or Schlager again!
Full circle moment!
Different topic – how did you come up with the name Blooom?
Oh. I was 20 and thought it sounded cool. That’s it. No exciting story, unfortunately. I had an alias before, and Fox Stevenson told me, “Hey, maybe change your name – that one’s not really marketable.” So I brainstormed for a week, and Blooom came out of it.
Fair enough! You’ve already had quite the fast rise in the scene, but what really blew everything else out of the water in that regard was the one-two punch of ‘Sweet Dreams’ and ‘Bombalaya’. How did you experience that?
So many people played it.
They still do!
The thing is, ‘Bombalaya’ is actually older than ‘Sweet Dreams’. ‘Bombalaya’ basically wrote itself in a week – the core idea came together on the first day. ‘Sweet Dreams’, on the other hand, I worked on for weeks, constantly rewriting it, because I loved that break so much and wanted to play it at a gig. It never felt like a “planned release”, I just wanted to write something for my sets.
After I played ‘Sweet Dreams’ for the first time – that was a week after I had produced it – it completely blew up in our scene just because of some random video I recorded at a High Tea gig in this tiny club somewhere in The Netherlands. And then I was suddenly getting like 50 DMs a day from DJs and artists, all following me at once. It was overwhelming. I have to say, I suddenly felt a lot more protective. I’d never had the feeling before that I didn’t want to share my music. But suddenly I thought, “Oh fuck, maybe you’ve created something you shouldn’t give to everyone, something you should maybe keep to yourself.” That kind of protectiveness – I had never felt that way about my music before.
Then came ‘Bombalaya’, which I started slowly sending around, and now it’s just become this thing. I’m part of the scene now. Suddenly more bookings were coming in. Suddenly people knew my name. Everything happened incredibly fast. I think it’s been three years. It really flew by. I also finished my doctorate on the side, and I can barely remember it. Honestly, it feels like it happened just last winter. But of course, I’m super happy with how it all turned out.
You really don’t get the time to pause and take it all in.
Yeah, I still haven’t done that to this day. In October, I get to play for Worried About Henry at Drumsheds in London. I really want to pause with my manager then and just go, “Fuck, what the hell happened in the last few years?!” It’s still within our little drum & bass world, of course, but at the very beginning I had this goal of playing at Printworks. That’s obviously tough now. But Drumsheds is basically the replacement for that, and I think it’s absolutely crazy that I’m even being considered. I haven’t fully processed it.
Amazing. You mentioned your doctorate earlier. What was your PhD about?
I did my PhD in Data Science at the University of Mannheim and finished it at the end of last year. Since then, I’ve been a full-time musician! My doctoral work was in the subfield of price collusion – basically, how AI can be used to collude on pricing, or how different AIs might collaboratively, and without human intervention, set prices, and if so, how we can prevent that. So I spent a lot of time training AIs, observing and analyzing them.
First of all, congrats on becoming a full-time musician!
Thank you so much! Right now things are looking great, but I’m aware of the privileged situation that I’m in.
Second of all, back to your PhD – do you think your technical background and diving into these AI topics helps with producing music? Do you use anything you learned in your research?
What I really learned during my PhD is how important curiosity is to engage with new topics. For me, knowledge just doesn’t happen without curiosity. I realized how I can really work through and grasp complex subjects. During the past few years, especially during my PhD, I often tried to really understand what was happening. Like, what exactly is going on when I tweak something on an EQ, or how an effect truly works. That knowledge helped me a lot in sound design. Basically, to do all the nerdy producer shit!
And since last December, you also started a Patreon, right? How did that come about?
It’s kind of a two-fold thing. On the one hand, it’s a financial support that really makes things a lot easier and means I don’t have to take on a side job. On the other hand – and this is something I really want to develop further – there’s now this little community of people who are all into the same nerdy stuff. We all kind of get the same joke, the drum & bass in-joke, and we’re on the same wavelength in that regard. I’d like to build a little safe space for people who are in the fanbase, in the community. You sometimes see the same faces at gigs, and it’s kind of a shame if those people never get to know each other. I want to be the point of contact for that. That’s my goal for this year and next. Also, to honor the people who are part of all this. For example, I recently did a guestlist ticket giveaway – stuff like that. I’d love to do even bigger things. Maybe even organize events at some point. I’d be super excited about that.
Love that! You moved to Leipzig about 3 years ago. Have you settled in, and how does the scene there compare to your previous home Mannheim?
It’s totally crazy here. There’s a scene in Mannheim too, and honestly, it’s thriving. Also in Heidelberg, huge events. I have actually checked the events in Heidelberg out a couple of times! But I have to say, I didn’t experience drum & bass in Mannheim that intensely, partly because I had only done one or two festivals at the time, and I never thought I could really integrate into that local scene. Probably also because I’m kind of a hermit crab. I sit in my studio all day and think, “Ah, no one wants me barging in.”
I wouldn’t say I’m fully connected in Leipzig either, but I played here for the first time in January and got in touch with the local scene, and I honestly regret not doing it sooner. It was such a great experience, working with them. And I also realized what insanely great lineups and musical taste this local scene has. Like, the fact that the Eli (Editor’s note: The elipamanoke is a club in Leipzig) just casually has five techy sets and 140 BPM sets in one night – and it’s sold out! In January! That still blows my mind, and I think it’s absolutely amazing.
I played in Mannheim a few months ago and realized – damn, there was a scene there that I just never saw, full of really cool people. To anyone reading this who’s never gone to a rave because they didn’t dare or whatever: the people are insanely cool, and they’ll probably show you tracks you’ll never forget. The German scene is really thriving right now, I’d say. Especially after COVID, after such a deep slump where many struggled – I’d say we’re on the way back up.
I think so too! On a final note, what’s next for Blooom?
Actually, singles almost every month! Lots of collabs that I held back before releasing my EP, because I wanted to focus on the EP first. So now some tracks are coming out that don’t just have my name on them. Some remixes too, of course. Up next is a collab with PVC and Protostar on D&B Allstars, a Freaks & Geeks collab with Cameron Hayes on Shogun, a release on Elevate, and a collab with Arcando. I’m working on… big things! Big things coming!
What I’m really back and forth on right now: I want to do way more video projects. That was so much fun with the EP.
You mean like promotional content?
Yeah. Maybe not just promotional though. For example, I’m working on a set for UKF right now. But I don’t want to do it like many others and deliver just a regular set. I want something cinematic, something no one’s really done yet. I want to bring more art into video content. Not enough people are doing that. A lot of content is just “socials content for socials content”, but I think bringing art into it is super enriching for the scene.
Very excited for that! Any final shout-outs?
Oh yeah. Shoutout. Always shoutout to Tom Finster, of course. Flo Phace. Daniel Voicians, of course. Jon Void, Jonas. Maksim MC, Mila Falls. Chris Montee und Quinten Dux n Bass. Shoutout Lennart Hoffmann – that one has to go in! Big shoutout to all the German promoters who keep the scene alive.
I keep hearing different things. Some promoters say there’s nothing going on, others say it’s great. However they all say: “I don’t care, I’m going to keep going.” They’re all so passionate. If I ever get to the point where I’m financially able to do it, I really want to support the local scene here. That’s the goal eventually. That would be so sick – a Blooom & Friends kind of thing. Say I get to a point where I can fill a club on my own. Then I could fill the rest of the lineup with the Leipzig scene or other local acts. I definitely want to do that. I just want the promoters to actually make some profit from it, and hopefully use that to push the scene forward. That would be amazing.
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