Located deep in the Tele2 Arena is mmmmm, one of Stockholm’s best underground clubs for electronic music. They’ve recently expanded the concept to nights like Femmmmm, their 12 hour ‘half-day festival’. We met Martin Kling and Majkel Kokocinski, the duo behind the club, to find out more.
So how did you get started with mmmmm?
Martin: Basically, the guys who have the venue asked me to do a club here. I was a little unsure about this location. But the venue and the room itself is amazing
Majkel: We basically said we want this soundsystem, this DJ booth, and they said yes to everything.
Martin: They said if we wanted to do it we could do it exactly as we wanted. So it was hard to say no. Majkel and I met two and a half years ago through music, and I asked him to join me in this. When we opened it felt easy, because we knew what we wanted to do.
So you’ve said the club is set up for DJs, to give them the optimal conditions to perform. So what kind of set-up do you have here for that?
Martin: I mean, take us for example. When we play we have the mixer and two vinyl players. That’s the set-up.
Majkel: We have really good monitors in the booths, so you can hear [the audio you’re playing] really well. We have really solid DJ booths, you can play vinyl without skipping, there are no problems. And we have nice vinyl players, with extra range for the pitch. Not all clubs have these things.
Martin: Basically, you can say we try to put as much into the small details as possible. Maybe for another club it doesn’t matter what kind of vinyl player you have, if it’s this one or that one.
Majkel: But for us, it has to be the perfect conditions for playing vinyl.
Martin: Our theory is that when the DJ doesn’t need to think about how to play, they’re going to play music in a different way to when you have to struggle with the sound and playing or whatever. When everything is good, you can stop thinking about how you’re going to play and just focus on playing and how you feel.
You guys pitch yourselves as an underground club. So what kind of music do you want to specialise in and promote here? If you could put together a sample of artists and DJs who would be the DNA of mmmmm, who would you pick?
Majkel: Nicolas Lutz, Francesco del Garda, Gwenan, Onur Özer, Binh, Zip, Omar, Etienne, Andrew James Gustav, Slow Life Crew, Libertine Crew, Convextion. That type of sound. That’s what we consider underground sound.
And so you also put a lot of emphasis on the non-musical side of things, the layout and the visuals. So how important is it to have the club as a complete experience with all those aspects in place?
Martin: The number one for a club is always to have a good sound. If you have a good sound, everything else is decoration. If you don’t have a good sound then it doesn’t matter what you do, it’s never going to be a good club. If you have a good sound then you have the possibility to create something that you’ll remember the day after. If you remember a club the next day it’s mostly because of the sound.
And one final question: Is there anything you’d say to someone coming to mmmmm for the first time, to help them get the best out of it. What attitude would you tell them to have going in?
Martin: I would say it takes time to have fun. So put in a couple of hours of relaxing in the atmosphere. That’s why we open at five (for the Femmmmm club). It’s not that we want to have the same club we have at five in the morning at five in the afternoon. It’s so if you have the day off, you can spend it with your friends and go to a party and spend like ten or twelve hours together. Then you’re definitely going to have a different experience to a normal night, where you begin at home, take a cab to the club, stay there two hours, maybe then go to an afterparty. That’s also fun, but this is something else. You can start a conversation with your friends that lasts for twelve hours, which isn’t something that happens everyday. Put in the time and you’ll have fun.
mmmmm is open on Fridays and Saturdays at Arenavägen 75. For more info see their Facebook.
