Cosmic Gate

Conceived in 1998 after a chance meeting in a label office, Cosmic Gate, aka Nic Chagall and DJ Bossi are a perfect fit. Over a decade of consistent success, both in their homeland of Germany and abroad (their track Fire Wire charted top 10 in the UK), is no easy feat. Plenty of amazing production duos have fallen by the wayside during their eleven year tenure. Their secret? Agreeing on the important stuff.

“I think we see more of each other than anyone else,” says Chagall, as Bossi chuckles in the background. “I think the secret is that we have the same ideas about the stuff that we make; when we are in the studio or DJing we agree on 99% of the stuff that we are doing. I think that’s the secret; we don’t have to fight to come to a decision, we have the same opinion about music which makes it very easy in the end.”

However, they do agree that this friendship and partnership that they have is indeed a rare thing in a world where the pressure to perform at an increasingly high level can be overwhelming.

“Yeah, to have this sort of chemistry is for sure a rare thing. Friends of ours had a project together, but they came from different genres within dance music and to see them DJ together was funny,” laughs Bossi. “It wasn’t Djing together; it was two guys playing two different sets in one. You have to work together. It’s always good to have someone next to you when you aren’t quite sure about which direction you should go, so this works out perfectly for us.”

Consequently, Cosmic Gate will almost always play as a unit these days. When so many production duos will DJ separately under the same moniker these lads are joined at the hip, which is always great news for fans. Firstly, they provide direction for the other, which prevents their sets from losing way, and secondly, it gives them a chance to party along with the crowd.

“In the early years we did half of our gigs together, and the other half we would play solo, but two years ago we decided that Cosmic Gate was a joint project that involved both of us. It would be more special for the crowd to see us both,” they explain. “One of us will be mixing, and the other one will be partying with the people, you know? So we’ve decided that 95% of the gigs that we play we will play together.”

So chances are, if you love Trance then you love Cosmic Gate. Since their timeless tracks Exploration of Space and Fire Wire rocked dance floors in the early parts of the millennium, Nic Chagall and DJ Bossi have built a legion of fans the world over. However, as time has passed their sound has grown and evolved from music with a harder edge to something a little more subtle yet driving. This presented a problem, says the pair.

“We were still getting requests to play our old tracks, and we really enjoyed playing them, like Firewire and Exploration of Space, but our current sound was so removed from our earlier sound it became harder and harder to integrate these earlier tracks into our sets,” explains Chagall. So we thought ‘OK, let’s bootleg ourselves’.

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So before a gig they did a quick bootleg of Exploration of Space. It went so well they had people for months afterwards asking them for it. This is how their remix album, Back 2 the Future, was born, complete with a slew of high profile guest remixers, like Rank 1 and their good friend Wippenberg. “We couldn’t do remixes of all of them because it’s quite difficult to remix your own tracks, so we asked other producers to do it and it became an album,” says Bossi.

Back 2 the Future is Cosmic Gate for the next generation of trance lovers. Incorporating many of their tracks from 1999 through to 2003, the guys have spread around the style with the first disc being more uplifting trance. The second is altogether more housey and progressive, which gives each remix, and the album as a whole, a real diversity.

For example, the original Trance sound which used to pump out of club systems everywhere in the earlier part of this decade is quite similar to Jochen Miller’s current style, so it’s not surprising he’s kept his remix of Back To Earth quite true to its original sound. Not so for Russian tech master Arty’s remix of the same tune however, who creates a very haunting breakdown and introduces an erratic flow to the bass line which acts as the pulse for the track.

There are no disgraces to the original Cosmic Gate tracks over the course of this album. Simply put, these tracks came from a time when Trance music did not have so many cross genre styles in its productions. The big riffs of the originals are all to be found in these remakes, albeit wrapped around the extra production that goes into making records today.

They are also a great reminder of a time when Trance music in particular was a dominant force, those classic Cosmic Gate melodies once forgotten but now, repackaged as new. Chagall and Bossi refute the idea that remixing these classic tunes came with a sense of weighty responsibility.

“No, because it was our own decision and, even before we did them, we totally had an idea of how they should sound,” they explain. “So it was very easy, honestly, to do that. If someone else had asked us to do it we would have been like I don’t know about this, and it would have been a lot more pressure.”

“With Exploration of Space it was like, one day, or something; we had the vision of how it would sound and how we wanted to make it. It didn’t always go smoothly with all the remixes because sometimes you have a vision and then you get into the studio and it doesn’t work properly.”

Getting set to blow apart dance floors at Future Music Festival, Cosmic Gate admit that their dynamic up on stage is second nature, but that keeping it fresh and exciting is never an issue. These guys just love what they do, and it shows.

“Well yes, this is something that is kind of automatic sometimes, but this doesn’t mean that one gig is like another,” Bossi muses. What we always try to do is play back to back, I mix the first record, he mixes the next; but essentially we just go with the flow…”

“…It’s the changing music, different clubs and different people,” interrupts Chagall. “Especially nowadays we have such a wide range of music to play, and the clubs change and the people change. It never gets boring…”

“…it’s not work, it’s fun,” continues Bossi. “And like Nick said, there’s always a new track that you are excited about playing out. We just love it so much.”

Cosmic Gate [GER] play Future Music Festival with The Chemical Brothers [UK], MGMT [US], Plastikman [CAN] and more on Sunday March 13 at the Flemington Racecourse. Back 2 The Future is available now on 405 Recordings through iTunes and in stores.