Where sound learns to breathe

Our work has always grown out of a simple impulse: to create space for sound to evolve freely. Over time, this space became something like a laboratory — a place where ideas are not designed but discovered. Tracks often emerge the way chemical reactions do: slowly, unexpectedly, through combinations that weren’t planned but suddenly make sense. We don’t start from genres. We start from curiosity.

One part of this laboratory mindset is reflected in the early years of Freund der Familie. What began in 2007 as a way to release our own music — independent and without expectations — quickly became a field for experimentation. Vinyl was essential to us from the beginning, not for nostalgia, but for its physicality. Many early releases were hand-stamped, assembled by hand, graphically improvised. Not as a concept — simply because music felt more honest as an object.

This open process naturally led us to other artists, remixers and collaborators. Our catalogue grew slowly, chapter by chapter, always shaped by intuition rather than direction. Dubtechno may be our most familiar reference point, but our interests have always stretched wider: dubstep, ambient, electronica, leftfield, techno, house — everything that lives somewhere within the deeper spectrum of electronic music.

Some of these explorations took on their own shape. One of them is our GRAU series — a line dedicated to repetition, reduction, and texture. Often raw, sometimes sketch-like, always precise in its own way. GRAU is less a series and more a playground: a documentary zone inside the label, a place where material can remain unfinished, fragile, or reduced to its core.

What has defined Freund der Familie to this day is not a fixed genre but an attitude: Music is allowed to emerge slowly, remain unpolished, and develop without needing to meet a market or an expectation. Our foundation is deep electronic music — but its form is intentionally open. That openness is the reason the label has evolved the way it has: organically, quietly, and always from the music outward, never from a concept.