Denis Stockhausen - Connecting The Dots (2021)

The idea of experiencing a DJ set by Denis Stockhausen from a distance, with that spatial distance that has long been an unquestioned standard at many festivals and other major events in the electronic dance music circus, is completely absurd. Meter-high stages, aristocratic DJ booths made of steel and concrete, crowd fences below and VIPs in selfie frenzy above – these are not places where man nor DJ Denis Stockhausen will ever feel at home. His natural habitat is the club, that small, cramped, hot space full of bodies that don’t crave distance, but closeness. For whom the mixture of high volume, high temperature and sensory overload is the elixir of life – those who need the opposite of distance and hygiene: Intimacy and dirt.
With this passionate appeal, which doesn’t want to fit at all into the current time, Denis Stockhausen opens his Connecting The Dots mix, which he of course recorded in his beloved Gewölbe Club in his adopted hometown Cologne. Such a mix is usually recorded, if not at home anyway, in the concentrated solitude of an empty club, yet in this case in particular it is a sad notion that Denis was not surrounded by dancers whose physical closeness, reaction and emotion constantly nourishes and drives his particular way of DJing in a way that people only do together in the dark of night: Wenn Du wissen willst, was mich berührt (If you want to know what touches me).

Denis Stockhausen, heart, soul and emotional volcano always on the verge of eruption, epicenter made man of what KOMPAKT as a company and place holds together in its innermost, was and is animated by an enthusiasm and love for this music like hardly anyone else. His artistic expression is characterized by a genuineness, a directness and an almost naïve, childlike emotionality, just as it is simultaneously borne by great knowledge, love, passion and blind mastery of the DJ craft. With his unwavering faith, Denis moves mountains. The professional coldness and commercial calculation that has always dominated the DJ vanity market are the exact opposite of what he does. Eisen, mein Herz.

There is no need to bother with boring track titles and name dropping to find out it’s all there in his Connecting The Dots mix. To loosely describe it after another KOMPAKT hit: It’s Sex With Denis Stockhausen. A big wild horny party, tender and hard at the same time, with which Denis celebrates the musical memories, moments and people that have shaped the last almost 30 years of Kompakt for him. All of it means the world to him. Finally, between the lines, this mix tells his very personal stories from one thousand and one nights, in which Denis threw his heart on the dance floors all over the world, brutally open, naked, with one big gesture: Happiness.