Interview: Frieda Lux

"Nachtbus" came out on Friday, and I went to Leipzig to talk to Frieda Lux about it. She had a 1980s rotary mixer in pieces on her kitchen table, in the same room as the radio show, and carried on working on it while we spoke.

TA: What's on the table?

FL: A UREI 1620. Someone in Dresden bought it for a high price and had it serviced badly. All the capacitors were replaced with new ones of the wrong value. So I am undoing that.

TA: Why do it yourself?

FL: Because I want to know how they work. A mixer is the last thing the music passes through that a person is touching. You spend two thousand euros on a deck, you have a good needle, and then you put it through a cheap chip and ask why it sounds flat. An old rotary has one job. You turn it and the level changes, slowly, with a long throw. You cannot cut with it, and I don't want to.

TA: I've seen you do the 5am thing, where you take the master down.

FL: You wrote about that. People came up to me about it. It only works if they don't know, so I would rather you left it there.

The buses

TA: "Rückweg" was the way home from the party, in order. This is the way home again.

FL: It is a different way home. On "Rückweg" I was thirty-three, I took the last S-Bahn. Now I am thirty-seven, I have a bad back, and I am on the night bus with a bag of records at quarter to six. It is a different record.

TA: Which bus?

FL: There is an N10, which is track one. N3 is the second track, because you have to change at the Hauptbahnhof in the cold and wait with everybody. There is a security man from the station, a girl still in a costume, a baker going in the opposite direction. In all this time I have never seen a person on a night bus look at someone else. And everyone is listening to something. I would like to know what. I wrote it for the man with the headphones and his head on the window.

TA: "Fensterscheibe".

FL: That is the window. You can hear a head on it. I put a contact mic on the window of the N10.

TA: You got that from Anselm?

FL: I got it from a two-euro disc.

TA: Have you ever wanted to drive one?

FL: I know a driver. Her name is Heike, and she has done the night routes for twenty-six years. She is thanked on the sleeve. I once asked if she was bored, driving the same loop. She said nobody asks a DJ that.

"It's a good record for when you've got an hour on a bus. I don't know who else it's for." Frieda Lux

The other things

TA: You've got the launch on Saturday at Distillery, in the new place.

FL: The interim place. I started going to the old one on Kurt-Eisner-Straße when I was seventeen, with a fake ID that said I was twenty, and they knew. Then it was gone, and so was IfZ, and I had a bad couple of years walking around this city. So it is good that it is there. It is seven hours, one bag. I have chosen the records already.

TA: Which ones?

FL: No.

TA: You've posted once on Instagram this year, a photograph of a capacitor.

FL: It was an Elna. It is a very good capacitor.

She showed me the capacitor. It was another hour before I left, and I missed my bus.