tone bano

It should be easy to be explained.
But maybe not. Here a little history of raum & tone bano:

It was in the beginning of 2006 about march. My wife just left me and i was totally emotionally collapsed. but yeah i had my baby, my little weekly Playground parties in Zentraus (little restaurant in Barcelona). They were doing not so well. I couldn’t believe my eyes, when i flew over Axel Bartsch the first time to Barcelona and only 30 people showed up to dance, thinking that now everytime he plays for raum minimum 500people will show up.
It was quite hard in nights like this.

But then i met a guy in my friends recordsshop for Schranz & Hardtechno Music, called Trivial Musik. Quite not the most digestive music on earth, but it has his followers and Victor and I; we’re old friends from school and i have seen the scene growing with objective eyes. And he can be proud of what he’s doing! Real Underground in my eyes.

So this guy, quite an old guy, but years in the techno scene. He had an option for a location right downtown barcelona.
I made up a cocnept and it was quite easy:
• underground style location
• stylish people
ª quality bookings
• good sound system (most promoters in barcelona do not get the importance of this!)

Our promo concept was good, but due to the old man who didn’t really realize what he was doing and afraid of almost every investment, the raum fell apart and we reorganized.
I was smart enough to copyright the name beforehand. I created and designed the whole branding and i never got paid for it, so the decision to do so was easy.

One of my best friends in that time went on with me and I started to move my contacts to built up the raum booking agency.
I didn’t want to raum die. After all, this project was my new wife. And my first wife left.

But then again. Like it happened a lot before in my life. My supposed best friend had a project on the side. After a long conversation about a payment I just made for the website hosting, I found out that he was doing his own thing with another friend on the side.
He didn’t want to tell me what his project was about. So I actually told him that i don’t want to be partners with somebody who doesn’t play with open cards.
I found out he was just doing the same thing i was preparing for the last couple of months. With tears in my eyes I thought, and thats a subjective conclusion, he just needed my contacts and my ideas, because he is not from the creative sort of person. So after that I was on my own.

Quite the same thing happened to me with another friend in June 2007. I was blinded again by false friendship and the evil power of bad producers with no ideas. I made a whole branding concept (Designs, Website, Labels, Logo, etc....) for a label which was supposed to half/half deal. I take care of Marketing, and he does take care of A&R. Also it wasn’t really my type of music, and i think we differ in estetics and style quite a lot, actually he doesn’t have any.
I made this crazy dossier for the distributer Intergroove in Germany. Which was well received and i also found out they send it to 4line records as an example for how a project has to presented to them.
Anyways...story is, that my good friend designed the website. I gave her the layouts and she did almost everything by herself. The outcome was definetly supreme. He contacted her to get the original files. But those were a present from her to me. Which means that i got this website in exchange for a whole lot of my favourite music. I designed Logo, Labels and other paraphenalia. Lets say that he couldn’t pay for all this work, found a young creative guy with good ideas and promised him 40% of the company.
In the first situation he smells to get him out. He attacks....
But this time he played with somebody who wasn’t as stupid as he thought he would be. Now his website looks like a 14 year old teenagers blog in highschool. And I’m still thinking about calling my lawyer and let him sue this guy because of the designs he’s using for the label right now which are mine. (Logo and Label). They’re still selling the Merchandise with my work and the first Vinyl release has my logo on them. Maybe it’s irish moral; call me old fashioned but in my world you got paid for your work. Or like my friend Safy says “Some people think they are the Ryanair of the electronic music business”.

Ok, that happened after I produced my first festival, which was highly succesful. 4000 and something people showed up. And a smile was over almost everybodys face. It had some organisational lacks, but I don’t think anybody else could have done this better in only 4 weeks time and 3 of these with promo. And all the sudden my friends helped me out, they came from all over, Italy, Germany, France, England, Hungary... it was amazing to see how people get toegether with one objective: to succeed with a new concept and innvoation. In that moment i felt that Barcelona was still in on top of his image but still hasn’t got a good weekly clubnight. So...

Raum open air was born! I gave it the name play. I always try to give a different name to each event concept i do. It always keeps the raum estetic. In the end everybdoy calls it raum anyways... so it’s just to give a title to the design we use. My next event cicle I’m preparing is called kits and the flyers will show a whole lot of raum neverland fairys and tell a little story. A kits story :)
Play was open air, right at the water in the Forum area of Barcelona. We had the most amazing soundsytem and everybody who partied there was definetly in the loop of the upcoming, the new way to party in Barcelona. It was sunday nights and we managed to have barcelonas coolest partykids all in one venue.

The closing night was in everybodys mouth for weeks and weeks and Lucianos manager told me in secret something that made me feel very proud of my work: “Luciano just told me that this was the best set of his life!”.... Wow! i couldn’t believe my ears! She didn’t know that I’m a big fan of everything he did and does. We were talking in the crazy afterhour we prepared for us that morning in Nave 9-10 and it was good to see the whole raum crew living their freedom, sitting, dancing and freaking out with a huge smile on all their faces.
Luciano gave me a hug, smiled and said that he had a wonderful time, Argenis didn’t stop to show me how much he loved the party and how much fun they had. I must say that the cadenza crew is a bunch of really down to earth people and they have all raums support here in Spain. It is nice to collaborate with professional people who do not forget what this is all about.

It was more then a 9 week event cicle, there was a family feeling among all of us. Some adventures in this season really drained us (especially the rain cancellations), but my morals always told me: “You start something, you go through with it till the end!”. And my morals were right again! I felt like i did something for the greater good, something which was missing in Barcelona for a long time. raum is now a established brand with many business partners, collaborators, fans and friends all over the world.

raum was my wife, now it’s my baby and the baby’s learning to walk.

xx
Tone