You lose an airport, you gain a psychedelic disco band. Providing a new way for locals to take off, Tegel Boys are piloting classic boogie and beats in a rich and organic form. With six releases since their formation in 2022, they’ve have already successfully navigated the city’s club circuit. Now, producers Joel and Jeremy Black (not related) and instrumentalists Alican Tezer and Antonio Rilling are flying high, set to jet off for their European tour next year.
- Genre: Disco/House
- For fans of: Crazy P, PBR Streetgang
- Stand-out tracks: ‘That’s Enough’, ‘Flight Force’
How did you get together and why?
A pandemic, a rant against a closing airport, a symbol of the true-free-affordable-open-diverse melange of Berlin fading into the past. Musically, we aligned around a dirty table at dawn, our instinctual acid-cowboy turntable hijinks dripping on Berlin club sounds at the after-hour.
Describe your sound in one sentence.
Modern disco body music, in-flight acid house, airport-blues-boogie, hi-fi dada-rap with a fountain of sample-delic digger knowledge channelling parallel lives in NYC-Loft-Manchester-Hacienda-Acid-Istanbul and every other boogie-scorched molecule of human hip-shake.
What topics do you deal with in your music?
Love and loss, and the Berlin-human condition.
What’s your favourite track you’ve created?
This changes daily. ‘That’s Enough’, a new single, does really hammer home the Tegel Boys aesthetics.
How would you describe Berlin’s music scene?
Fragmented, elusive but infinitely rewarding. People are waking up to all the nuances lost from being placed in the ‘techno’ box for so long.
Are there any Berlin artists you’d like to collaborate with?
We love Mehmet Aslan, singer Jontee Bowater, and we all have great confidence in attracting the perfect freaks to align with our visions.
You can pick a support slot for any artist, dead or alive. Who is it and why?
We are students of Turkish psych-rock, so opening up for a full-on Barış Manço tour-de-force would be a lovely feather in our hat.
If Berlin was a song, it would be…
‘Don’t You Want Me’ by Human League.
Are there any unexpected benefits of being a musician in Berlin?
Remarkable tenacity and patience with comic levels of club-stage-venue chaos… it strengthens the resolve and flexibility as artists.
What are you currently working on?
A pro-wrestling homoerotic slow-jam ballad to break the radio and, separately, a high-energy acid funk workout with a stop-you-dead-in-your-tracks original Michael McDonald vocal.
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