SHANTEL

KOSHER NOSTRA out now

Biographie

SHANTEL // DJ SESSIONS
SHANTEL & BUCOVINA CLUB ORKESTAR

“The question of musical authenticity keeps cropping up. I’m pretty sure that’s a general problem in every genre of art today. What’s real, after all? Nothing is! Everything has another side to it. That’s what convinced me that nothing is authentic any more – not even music.” Dr. Winston O’Boogie

Shantel is an exceptional artist with a global reach. He has won international awards for several of his albums, which cover a broad range of styles, and has fired up the atmosphere at hundreds of gigs, festivals and parties with his uniquely eclectic sound. His Bucovina, Disko Partizani, Disko Boy and Citizen of Planet Paprika have made this German phenomenon (Vogue) famous throughout Europe (including Turkey, where Shantel is a pop icon) and beyond, inspiring countless artists from Finland to Buenos Aires and former Yugoslavia (where he is regularly featured on MTV Balkanika).

Shantel’s vision is to create a pan-European pop music with global appeal. And he really does seem to be doing just that. One of his pieces forms the soundtrack for a key scene in Fatih Akin‘s most successful film to date, Soul Kitchen. He has just returned from the Milan Fashion Week, where he created and performed the soundtrack for the Jean-Charles de Castelbajac Iceberg Show. Models and the media loved it. His diary is full until well into 2011. What little free time he does have, he spends in the studio, working with fellow musicians to come up with yet more gems.

But first things first: he will be on an extended DJ-tour until May. Then he’s off on another extended festival tour with the Bucovina Club Orkestar. The venues are getting bigger, too: he is scheduled as the opening act at both the Montreux Jazz Festival and Roskilde, has been invited back to play the Chiemsee Reggae Summer again, and will also be appearing at the Dockville Festival and the Taubertal – one of the most beautiful and coveted venues in the German summer festival calendar – as well as the c/o Pop in Cologne, which has finally stolen the crown from Popkomm. Sziget Budapest, Europe’s biggest ferstival, Couleur Café in Belgium, Francofollies in La Rochelle – quite an honour for a non-French musician – and Cosmopolis in Athens are also part of this summer extravaganza.

The wildest dreams, such as playing the Montreux Jazz Festival, have all come true. We remember the Orkestar’s first ever gig, at the North Sea Jazz Festival (2005), where the audience spontaneously pushed their chairs aside and turned the prestigious concert hall into a heaving dancefloor.

Shantel and his Bucovina Club Orkestar have played their way to well-deserved legendary status. The tightest line-up from the heart of Europe takes its work seriously: „You want anarchy and romance? You want to be catapulted out of the here and now with all its problems and worries? So do we – and we’re happy to take you with us to a new dimension. We come from different horizons, from different countries. We have learned a lot on our travels and we’d like to give some of that back.“ There is probably no other German artist who can enthrall audiences everywhere, from Greece to Glastonbury, the way Shantel can. Yet he does not see himself as some kind of prophet of multiculturalism. Nor does he have any aims of creating hippy-dippy, save-the-world music. Every performance, night after night, bears that out. Shantel sees himself as a cosmopolitan, a searcher, always on the lookout for new discoveries and new emotions that he can channel into his own personal music mix. He is the herald of central European creolisation. And his impact is lasting. Initially dismissed by the press as a mere flash in the pan, his music has spread through the internet (with millions of hits on YouTube) to such an extent that there can no longer be any talk of a wave, or a trend, but of a whole new attitude to life.

New single: fans voted loud and clear for Authentic, from the Planet Paprika album, following on from Bucovina Original and Citizen of Planet Paprika. Once again, Shantel has collaborated with some of his favourite colleagues – among them SchlachthofBronx: “it all just came together automatically, and the clubbers went wild“, and the global dancefloor phenomenon from Munich, and Wildstyle sound system operators Tommy Yamaha and Ekki Eletrico: “Yeah! We just really felt like doing the remix because our rework of Disko Partizani ignited dancefloors all over the world”. Two new versions were created by Shantel himself: Off the Wall was recorded live at a secret gig with Nil, one of Turkey‘s most exciting and innovative artists, at the Greenspan club in Hamburg. Sheik Kolo is thre fruit of a collaboration with Dream Team, a Serbian underground sound system that has so far been operating only on the internet. The video was shot at a concert by Shantel & Bucovina Club Orkestar at Vienna‘s legendary WUK club, with an incredible audience – the images speak for themselves.

***official Shantel myspace site***

OFFICIAL VIDEOS
DISKO PARTIZANI