M¥SS KETA:

You’re witnessing it, babe.

MK: I’ve always been obsessed with Miss Bashful, and we finally met at the Prototypes fashion show a couple of years ago. I think we were both hungover, but in Paris, who isn’t?

I think “Hangover Girl” was the perfect match because we both celebrate nightlife without pretending it’s glamorous all the time. The morning after is part of the story, too.

MK: Italy is a country where everyone is watching everyone else. The ‘nonni’ are always watching us, curious or scandalized, often both at the same time.

With Simone Bozzelli, the director of “Hangover Girl”, I share a love for the reactions an outsider can trigger in our conservative society.

MK: “Give me a mask and I’ll tell you the truth,” someone once said. Add to that a few corporate dramas and a little blackmail.

But I soon realized what a blessing it was to remain hidden and unknown in a world where visibility has become an obsession, so I never took it off.

MK: M¥SS KETA was born in Milan and from Milan’s contradictions: luxury and decay, fashion and underground culture, elegance and chaos. I move through all these worlds without belonging to any of them.

Over the years I’ve released five albums (or maybe more, I don’t remember), toured extensively around the world, appeared on television, and collaborated with fashion brands. But I’m far more interested in building a myth than a biography.

MK: I probably would have become a waitress in a bar, with a penchant for debauchery. But it’s still a viable alternative.

MK: Creating a recognizable universe that exists beyond songs. Fashion, performance, language, visuals, irony. I think I created a whole KETA world.

Also, I have a huge collection of Miss Piggy memorabilia, and I’m very proud of it.

MK: A Grammy would be nice. So would a Madonna feature.

MK: Juergen Teller. I was actually supposed to shoot a campaign with him last month, but unfortunately the shooting dates clashed with my Greek holidays.

MK: I’m always cooking up new music, but I’m pretty tired of the album menu. Does a chef always have to serve dinner as “entrée, first course, main course, dessert”? Boring.

So why should an artist always follow the same recipe: “first single–second single–album”?

Let’s see.

Massimiliano Pagliara:

When I first started making music, everything felt like an exciting discovery. I had been in Berlin for about five years, bought my first analogue machines, and spent countless hours learning through trial and error. Back then, I was very focused on the technical side of things, understanding synthesis, sequencing, and how the records I loved were actually made. Today, my relationship with music is much more intuitive. I trust my instincts more and spend less time questioning myself. Experience has taught me that emotion is ultimately more important than perfection. I still enjoy exploring new techniques, but now I’m more interested in creating something honest and meaningful than proving what I can do technically.

MP: Definitely It’s In Your Eyes, the track I made with my dear friend Aérea Negrot. We originally started it back in 2008, and after her passing, finishing it became an emotional journey. It wasn’t difficult from a musical perspective. It was difficult because it carried so many memories. For years, it remained unfinished, almost frozen in time. Bringing it back to life meant revisiting a very special friendship and a creative connection that meant a lot to me. This track is also a tribute to her artistry and a way of preserving a small piece of what we created together.

MP:

There are many different reasons. Some tracks were sketches that I never fully finished because, at the time, I didn’t yet have the skills to realise them the way I imagined. Others simply didn’t fit into the projects I was working on back then. Sometimes music gets left behind because you’re already excited about the next idea. When I started reflecting on twenty years of making music, I went through old hard drives and unfinished sessions. I realised there was an entire hidden story there. These tracks may have remained unreleased, but they were still part of my artistic journey. This anniversary felt like the perfect opportunity to bring all those forgotten moments together and give them a home.

MP: Absolutely. Dance taught me how movement creates emotion and how the body responds to rhythm. Even today, when I’m producing, I often think physically rather than intellectually. I imagine how a groove feels rather than simply how it sounds. As a choreographer, I was also interested in tension, release, contrast, and storytelling. Those same principles apply to music. Whether it’s a subtle build-up, a dramatic breakdown, or a simple bassline, I’m always thinking about movement and how people experience music through their bodies.

MP: A bit of both. Sometimes a track arrives with a very clear atmosphere in my mind. It might be a sunrise after a long night, a quiet walk through the park, or even the feeling you get from a film or a book. Other times, it’s much more abstract. What I enjoy most is leaving enough space for listeners to create their own stories. Once music is released, it no longer belongs only to the artist. It becomes part of other people’s lives, memories, and experiences. I love that transformation.

MP: It gave me the freedom to reinvent myself, both personally and artistically. When I arrived, the city felt full of possibilities. There was a sense that experimentation was encouraged and that people were genuinely interested in new ideas. The city has changed enormously over the years, but I still find inspiration here. It’s not necessarily the same Berlin I arrived in, but it’s still a place where different cultures, perspectives, and creative communities intersect. That exchange continues to feed my imagination.

MP: Collaboration pushes me outside my comfort zone. When you work alone, it’s easy to repeat familiar patterns. Another artist brings a completely different perspective, different references, and different ways of solving creative problems. I love the unpredictability of that process. Some of my favourite moments in the studio have come from ideas I would never have arrived at by myself. Collaboration is a reminder that music can be a conversation rather than a solitary act.

MP: I follow my instincts. I’ve always been a music lover first and a genre specialist second. My record collection has never been organised around strict boundaries, and neither has my creative process. Of course, influences are always present, but I don’t sit down and decide to make a house track or an Italo track. I simply follow whatever feels exciting in that moment. Sometimes the result fits within a genre and sometimes it doesn’t. That’s perfectly fine with me. I try to remain open-minded and I don’t feel the need to define myself through one specific genre.

MP: I think it’s both. Dance music allows us to escape everyday pressures, but at the same time it can bring us closer to who we really are. On a great dancefloor, people often become more open, more present, and more connected to their emotions. For me, the best dance music creates a space where joy, vulnerability, freedom, and connection can coexist. That’s a very powerful experience.

MP: The possibility of surprise. No matter how long you’ve been making music, there are still moments when something unexpected happens. It could be a melody, a sound, or an emotion that wasn’t there five minutes earlier. That feeling never gets old. Every new project is an opportunity to learn something about yourself and discover a place you’ve never visited before. Curiosity is what keeps me going. In fact, just last night I switched on all my machines and started playing a funky bassline on my Jupiter-4. I became completely absorbed in it. Eventually, I recorded it as a MIDI sequence and sent it through the Minimoog and the Mono/Poly as well. Hearing these three beasts playing the same bassline suddenly made everything feel hot, groovy, and full of energy. Moments like that still excite me enormously.

MP: I think joy is essential. Not as a form of denial, but as a form of resistance and healing. We all carry different worries and pressures, and the dancefloor offers a rare opportunity to be fully present with others.For a few hours, people from different backgrounds can share the same space, the same rhythm, and the same sense of possibility. There is something deeply beautiful about that. Joy creates connection, and connection is something we need now more than ever.

MISS BASHFUL:

It’s still sexy cunty dance music but just more digestible day to day, not so techno. I wanted to explore with a different sound.

MB:

It kinda just came together organically, I went to the studio with Luca Eck and they matched my freak, so we started pumping out tracks and it was so fun!

MB:

I like my song about 3MMC because I have a toxic relationship with it at the moment.

MB:

It was my first hard-ticket tour, it was expensive af but worth it – I had my sexy dancer Santi, sexy opener Miss Madeline, my sexy tour manager Big Dom, sexy choreographer Mila, my sexy DJ Luca Eck, sexy creative director Christiaan. Shoutout to the Hyper Dreams team as well for all the hard work! I just had the sexiest team with the sexiest vibes and my fans are literally the cutest. Lots of girlies. I just love being a mother.

Danziger99:

Very different things. It’s hard to name something concrete. It’s more a mix of many things you see, and you kind of put it together. There’s not one specific influence.

Musically, I personally would name Ludwig Hirsch but then also rappers like Bushido or 187. Maybe it does not sound obvious, but we do take influences from there too.

Amandus99:

It also changes over time. The first projects were inspired differently than now. It’s a process and it’s developing in another direction, also musically. Different influences came in.

A9:
There are metaphors, but most songs are still strongly based on reality. It’s personal, but I like to exaggerate things or build stories around them.

D9:
Same for me. Every song has some real situation in it. We just don’t always tell it very directly. It’s more diffuse. In the new project there are more concrete influences, musically and lyrically.

A9:
Not really in the process. We have a studio there, about an hour away. It shapes you a bit, but in sessions it’s not really a topic.

D9:
Same for me. The only influence is maybe aesthetic things like flags or logos from Burgenland that we sometimes use.

A9:
We’ve had bigger fights, but it’s settled over the years. We know each other since kindergarten, so the beginning was intense when everything started so fast. It affected the friendship, but now we handle it well. Of course we still argue sometimes.

A9:
It’s a new sound. Still some similarities, but it developed a lot. More rough, colder, a bit dirtier. Still has rave elements, but different.

D9:
Also more dark, dystopian. Lyrically harder, more direct and provocative overall.

D9:
It comes from a phase where it was unclear if we would continue at all. After a tour there was a low point. “Nothing forever” reflects that uncertainty.

D9:
Not really to quit overall, it was just unclear how exactly to continue, we had different ideas.

D9:

It developed through this experimental music course in Vienna, where I met the people. First bass, then keyboard, then drums – our ensemble formed step by step.

D9:
We sometimes play as a duo, trio, or five people. It depends on what side of the music we want to show.

A9:
Five people is a planned show, very structured. As a duo it’s more experimental, like an underground set. Both have their value.

A9:
A vocal straw and a special scarf.

D9:
Both. Studio is difficult because it’s not like a fixed schedule. It’s a balance. Live is the confrontation – you get immediate feedback. To be on stage is the final reward to me.

D9:
We got many demos, but are currently focusing on the album. We’re also trying to make the project and its impact last longer beyond release.

A9:
Yes, we have many unreleased songs and also some EPs in the making.

NEROMUN: Yeah, it’s funny, I never really use the word „home“ for here, I don’t have a connection to the term in general. It is definitely the place where I grew up, went to school and spent most of my life, even though it’s getting a bit tight. Mainz is very special, also because Wiesbaden and Frankfurt are so closely connected. There used to be many army bases here, which brought a lot of Black culture into the region. There were many Black clubs in the area, also in Mainz, but mostly Frankfurt and Wiesbaden. Techno too – this club „Dorian Gray“ in Frankfurt started techno in Germany first, but actually it was a funk and disco club, so also a Black space. But they were open to it, and that’s how the first raves started.
All that has definitely influenced me. I grew up with very good music, not only from my upbringing but also from the streets and my surroundings.
Also my old crew, „Sichtexot“ or Eloquent, who now lives in Wiesbaden, they were all here and we hung out and influenced and inspired each other.

N: I do read quite a bit, even though I don’t even enjoy it that much. I don’t do it for fun or to kill time, but to access art. I read books that aim to go in interesting directions with language itself.
To me, rap creators, but also musicians in general, are nowadays poets. They create poetry that people can actually access, much more maybe than contemporary poetry. I don’t even know many contemporary poets like that.

N: I actually do. I always carry a poetry book with me. I am not wearing my jacket, otherwise I could show you now.

N: Right now I have Georg Heym’s poetry with me, and Rilke is always in my bag. Poets from the beginning of the 20th century, they really resonate with me — Georg Heym, Georg Trakl, Else Lasker-Schüler, Rilke, Gottfried Benn — those are the kings and queens of poetry for me. And always have been. We read Hermann Hesse in 8th grade, and I was like, „whoa, this is crazy, I need to dig deeper into this“. So from there I moved over to Kafka and others and was just always reading a lot of that stuff.

Growing up, listening to artists such as Tyler, the Creator, I would google every single word I didn’t understand and treated lyrics as poems. For me they’re on the same level, there’s no difference.

N: I don’t really think about it in that context, but if I had to, I’d say it’s a circle that closes, sort of finishing off the previous three albums. It almost sophisticates my previous works where I was experimenting more – many techniques and approaches  that I was developing for the past six years I could finally apply instead of experimenting with them.

N: Everything has meaning and reference, it’s all thought through. But it’s important to me that, just like you said, it’s also feelings and vibes, because then the words gain a whole new meaning. They gain a new quality that means more to me than their alleged meaning.
There are plenty of deep reasons, such as: „How does meaning work?“ There’s this theory that we limit words to what they mean, but in reality there’s much more, such as the sound of it. The sound, the vibe is what actually sets our body into vibrations. And I really like to play with that. 

Open texts inspire more people to click onto that and continue writing, or not necessarily writing but just expression in general.
Like Kafka, his works are open, „not finished“, with an open ending. And there’s this huge argument about whether they are actually unfinished or intended like that. His novels are endless, such as in „The Trial“, the protagonist is just trying to understand what’s happening to him and there’s no end to it. If there was one, it would be too easy — we could say, okay, that’s the moral of the story, done. But with the story remaining open, there are all these threads continuing forever. And that’s one of the reasons why Kafka is so popular, it simply doesn’t end.

N: Right now it’s a bit of a transition phase, to see what’s happening, what’s working. I have the feeling I want to change my name again. For now, I’ve always done three albums for each artist name, like trilogies. I have the feeling I haven’t reached my final form yet and the name has a lot to do with that somehow. But the new identity hasn’t revealed their sound to me yet – just some feelings and playing around a bit, but nothing final yet. To me that’s the most beautiful phase of creating, when you’re figuring it out and are insecure and tripping over like a child that has just learned how to walk, it’s cute.

N: Gratefulness, consciousness, empathy, love of one’s neighbour as well as your enemies. We haven’t really covered that yet, but somehow I really found Jesus in the past year, my whole life just flipped around.
Gratefulness is so important — for example before my song „Prayer 3“, in which I am saying „I am hella thankful“, I’ve never done anything like that. I never expressed gratitude in a song. So many times I’ve worked through my anger and sadness, but when I made this song, I was levitating. When recording, you need to repeat it maybe 50 times. So for 50 times I was saying „I am hella thankful, I am thankful, I am thankful“. After that I was flying. And I realized: „Oh my god, this is it, I must be way more aware and thankful and actually say ‘thank you’ after each day.“
Same as for my song „Im Licht“, where I’m saying „You’re being heard when praying“, and it’s true. You are being heard when you pray, you can manifest everything. And that’s something that is far from finished for me, I want to really get to the bottom of this and work with it.