Meet the beetle

FLY GUY Bug gets lost in his soaring sounds.

A few days at Miami’s annual Winter Music Conference tends to deaden the ears. The sprawling get-together features so many DJs and so much 140-decibel boom-boom-boom that, even for the discerning listener, everything starts to blend together after a day or two. By the fifth day, who cares who’s on the decks?

It was on the fifth day of last year’s conference that 1,000 or so hard-core clubbers were hanging out—make that staggering around—in the sun-drenched courtyard of a club called Pawn Shop. A lineup of world-class techno spinners was playing, but at that stage of the game, it didn’t really matter who was on at any given time. A few tracks after one particular set began, however, attention jolted back to the music, which somehow sounded richer, deeper and just more important than it had a few minutes ago. Looking up toward the booth, the throng could see why: Germany’s Stefan Brügesch, better known in clubland as Steve Bug, was rocking the tunes.

Bug, who’s spinning at Cielo this Thursday, has a straightforward explanation for why his set differed from that of the other jocks that day. “It’s just a matter of finding tracks that have some kind of feeling to them,” he says. “You do need some purely beat-oriented tracks that work on the dance floor. But when you’re on that floor, it’s important to be able to just close your eyes and enjoy what you’re listening to, and for that you need some beautiful sounds to help carry your mind away. It’s important to play music that helps people get rid of everything that they’re carrying around.”

Sounds pretty straightforward, but it takes experience to put such a plan into action. Spinning since 1991, Bug has long been one of techno and electronic house’s quality-control workers; his productions, his constant deejaying and his respected Poker Flat, Dessous and Audiomatique labels all command respect. (A new Poker Flat compilation, Dead Man’s Hand, is out now.) But perhaps the most notable thing about Bug is that, in an era where minimal techno rules the digital-dance world with an iron fist, he’s as comfortable with lush, deep-house sounds as he is with boinging techno.

Bug attributes his range to one simple factor: age. “I’m old enough to have grown up with Chicago house and Detroit techno,” the 38-year-old says. “By 1988, I was already going to clubs where that music was played. And even before that, I was going to clubs where they were playing Prince, Michael Jackson and Italodisco, and I guess that music all made an impression.”

It’s a musical overview that, in his view, is missing in many younger producers. “If you only know minimal—which I think is all a lot of people in Germany know—there’s nothing in your background to inform you about music,” he surmises. “It’s hard for them to know where to take the music beyond where it already is. I have the impression that producers don’t ask themselves, Does the world need another track just like all those other ones that already exist? And they just end up sounding like copies of copies of copies. The track may still work on the dance floor, but I’d rather just play the original.”

Given that statement, it’s not surprising that when Bug searches for inspiration, he looks to the past, not the present. “When I think that all the music out there is kind of boring, I can always listen to old house,” he says. “House has developed and developed, but where is it really going? To where everything sounds the same? For me, it’s always better to go the beginning and redevelop from there, rather than to start with something that someone else has developed. If I put on a good, old deep-house record, I always think that this is all I need. It’s got a nice groove, it’s a little sexy and it carries you away—what else do you want?”

Steve Bug spins at Made at Cielo Mar 20, 2008.