LADA is a collaborative project between Russian-born techno producer Dasha Rush and her German counterpart Lars Hemmerling. Initially conceived as a live performance project, LADA released their first EP “Lostbahnhof” on Rush’s label Fullpanda Records last year. While the duo mainly focuses on dark and trippy techno, the EP also contained the entirely beatless track “Den”. The haunted atmosphere of LADA’s music gets perfectly translated into moving images in the exceptional new video for the title track, which Rush and Hemmerling entirely produced by themselves (with Rush being responsible for the camera work and editing). We’ve asked Rush a few questions about the production of the clip – you can read her answers below the video player.
LADA will play a live set at Berghain in Berlin on March 24.
Video: LADA – Lostbahnhof
Dasha, how did you come up with the concept and the story for the video?
The video is a continuation of the initial idea for the track. We thought about how we could describe this timeless place called “Lostbahnhof”. A lost train station in which time, light and darkness alter the human perception of reality. A place where the main character Alice (a bit like in Lewis Carrolls’s Alice in Wonderland) meets weird, hardly definable characters who represent diverse aspects of human behavior such as love, fear, friendship, competition, while she attempts to figure out if she should stay in this mysterious place or go back to the “light” – if she can. As you may perceive it at the end, she falls in love with the mystery. And as a manifestation of her decision to stay, she timidly tries to embrace it.
Did you choose the black-and-white silent movie look because it fits the mood of the track or are you generally interested in the early era of film?
Certainly both! Actually, there are a bunch of elements that made us take this direction. First of all we were kind of bored of a lot of the videos related to techno which all seem to be made in a very similar way and without a story. Which does not mean that we don’t appreciate abstract visualizations of music, quite to the contrary! But subjectively it seemed like most of those videos are just one more extra copy of random images. We rather tried to tell a story.
Concerning the silent movie aesthetics itself, the idea was there from the beginning, although we were more interested in the era in which those movies were made. We wanted to take a part of the atmosphere of the silent movie era and bring it into the present (or the near future). We were trying to recreate this atmosphere, first with our music and then also with the video.
Where did you shoot the clip and how did you find the location?
We shot the video in a former industrial area not far from Berlin. At first, we were looking for an abandoned train station on the internet. Then we were just driving around, checking weird places. When we saw that factory, it looked so surrealistic that we went to have a closer look and found that it perfectly matched our mental image of “Lostbahnhof”. It sort of gave us that impression of not having a precise notion of time or geographic location.
The “Lostbahnhof EP” came out last year. What are your future plans for LADA?
LADA is a pretty new project and we are trying to develop it further alongside our solo projects. At the moment we are working on an album together and are preparing a new live set, which we will perform at Berlin’s Berghain on March 24. And there will be a tour through Asia by the end of the year, but it is a little to early to tell any more details about this already.
When did you start working together and how did that come about?
We ran to each other accidentally in Berlin at the place where we both have our studios, by the end of 2009. A bit later there were a couple of jam sessions with several other studio neighbours. That was when we discovered each others sounds, really. We found many similarities in our musical tastes. So we decided to jam together, just for fun at first. Then it developed quite naturally and it turned to LADA, followed by gigs and the first EP on Fullpanda Records.
