The K&D story is not just a story of refusal and renunciation. As the two started making music together in the early 1990s, there was hardly anything that the two didn’t do “wrong”, and therefore, exactly right. At the time, Vienna was a metropolis of the aspiring techno movement and was active, during the initial heyday of the revolutionary style. But the two gentlemen, K&D, rather followed the tradition of the continental cosmic “dancefloor” of the 1980s, which searched for a universal language of dance music, influenced by hip hop, rare groove, dub, new wave and last but not least, of music that stood out between all those categories.
As the first post-acid jazz productions of labels like Ninja Tune or Mo Wax heralded a new era, K&D were again already a step ahead. After their groundbreaking debut “G-Stoned” offers came pouring in like heavy rainfall in a mid summers day, but the two stubborn gentlemen didn’t play along: after the success of their “DJ-Kicks” and “Sessions” albums, which sold millions worldwide, they turned down most of them. K&D always enjoyed not following advice and abandoned all of the enticing major offers, all of the promises of full-speed marketing machinery. Instead, they provided musician friends with distribution on their G-Stone label and put together follow-up projects, like Dorfmeister’s Tosca or Kruder’s Peace Orchestra. Now the time felt right to open a new chapter in the book, written in K&D‘s own language: universal, global, unifying.
