SONO Celebrate Their Twentieth Anniversary with Best-Of Album

The Hamburg trio SONO is a fixture in electronic dance music.

This year, the band celebrates its 20th anniversary and treats its fans on this occasion with the best-of album “SONO – The Singles 2000 – 2020”. The album will be released on February 14, 2020 as CD, double vinyl, download, and stream. The anniversary and best-of album are reason enough for us to ask Florian, Lennart, and Martin a few questions:
KNM: What’s the concept behind “SONO – The Singles 2000 – 2020”?
Martin: Let’s just call it a retrospective. The title leaves little room for interpretation – it’s simply the singles we’ve released in 20 years.
KNM: Now you’ve been a band for 20 years. What drives you in your music? And has anything changed in those 20 years?
Lennart: Oh, many changes have happened. Initially, it wasn’t about songs – it was about tracks that were supposed to work in the club. That follows a different structure, a different build-up than a “classical” song. Over the years, we’ve written more songs and fewer tracks. For a while, we were caught between two stools. But we believe that we’ve remained open and still try out new things from time to time. That hasn’t changed in all these years.
KNM: Let’s look back at the beginning. What went through your minds when you released your first single?
Martin: For me, it was the first lyrics I had ever written. And it was very exciting to hear them in the club.
Lennart: Until “Keep Control”, I had nothing to do with electronic music, so the mechanisms with dance charts and DJ promo were completely foreign to me. It was very surreal.
Florian: And although it wasn’t the first release for Martin and me – we had already worked on remixes, it was still something special to come out with our own track…
KNM: Looking back, are there two or three highlights among the singles that seem particularly important to you?
Lennart: There’s actually a story to every song – some are better, some not so much. It has to do with the respective circumstances in which the singles were released. We have a turbulent history with various record labels behind us, all of which had their justifications and goals. But they weren’t always ours. However, it has shaped us and made us who we are today. And we’re proud of that.
KNM: Is there a song (or several) that you’d like to completely rewrite? Perhaps with a completely different approach?
Martin: I don’t think I want to completely rewrite any of them. It’s all okay as it is.
Lennart: We’ve done that often enough in the studio ourselves – for example, “Heading For” was the tenth attempt, by feel, to cover a Prince song. But we kept scrapping it and starting over.
Florian: …and eventually made our own song out of it.
KNM: 20 years is a long time for a band. Looking back, what was the greatest achievement for you as a band during this period?
Lennart: The greatest achievement is that we persevered!
Martin: We’ve really experienced highs and lows…
Florian: Some deep lows!
Martin: Yes. But the fact that we stuck together and stayed in this constellation, that’s probably the greatest achievement!
Lennart: A nice closing statement!
KNM: We agree. Thank you for answering our questions.