Session Victim Biography
September 2012

The late James Brown aside, you won’t see anyone with such a visceral connection with soul than Session Victim in the midst of a DJ set or live show.

Listening to their intricate work on Wolf Music, Permanent Vacation and Retreat (the vinyl only imprint that Hauke runs with Quarion) it’s easy to hear how Session Victim have also become the ‘go to’ producers for an expertly crafted dance floor bomb.

When you combine the remixing and DJ credentials with the release of their debut album on Delusions of Grandeur, one of the most hyped house labels out there, and the label says ‘we’re very proud and happy to be presenting their debut LP The Haunted House Of House on our humble label’, you begin to feel the warm respect that exists around these two crate digging aficionados as musicians in their own right.

Two of the most studious and unpretentious heads in house music, the secret to Matthias Reiling and Hauke Freer’s success is bound up in over two decades of friendship and a genuine obsession with music composition, samples and the warm crackle of a well-loved piece of vinyl. Mocking their penchant for locking themselves in their treasured Berlin studio in their name, ‘Session Victim’ have had a prolific and shimmering presence since their underground hit ‘Good Intentions’ reduced Move D to (good) tears when he used it to close his Free Rotation set in 2011.

Session Victim are the antithesis to both the superstar DJ and the hipster DJ. You won’t find them dressed head to toe in black wearing skinny jeans and a neckerchief and you won’t find them playing the same set more than once. What they play depends on you and each other and the beauty of this never ever yields the same result.

Having developed their infectiously exuberant live set so much around their album with Matthias on bass guitar, and smashing both their Boiler Room and Room 1 Fabric gigs, the guys will be touring North America for the first time in November to dose out their heady cocktail of deep house machine funk Stateside.

In terms of new material, Session Victim will be pushing the boundaries of their live show further in 2013 and are talking about bringing a vocalist into their studio fold who they can send out to buy the breakfast, among other things.

Expect more nice surprises.