Evolution, fashion and music all agree: if you don't change, you get left behind. So how has DJ Hell managed to stick around for more than 15 years? Hell - which, if you're wondering, comes from his real name, Helmut Geier - is the originator of electro-clash, the owner of International Deejay Gigolo Records, and an occasional fashion designer.
The electro-clash craze he started might have quieted to a dull roar and Gigolo Records witnessed a downturn as the halcyon days of genre mashing slowed to a gentle swing, but Hell continues to make Teutonic techno with a 1990s slant.
'Maybe [the 90s] were the golden years in my musical life,' he muses. 'To give a movement a name feels great. Now it's written in the music history books and Gigolo was running the show.'
In the 90s, Gigolo Records was arguably Germany's most successful electronic music label - and for a time, its most exciting. It popularised electro-clash icons including Vitalic, Princess Superstar and Miss Kittin and the Hacker. For many, the sleazy bass lines and glammed-up synths Gigolo was pushing were the artistic antitheses of the regimented electronic music of the time. It was dark, it was dirty and it was fun at the height of digital hedonism. Hell had earlier popularised an 80s revival in his hometown of Munich, and he ended up styling the electro-clash sound of 90s Berlin.
'To me, electro-clash was very open to all kinds of other musical genres,' he says. 'It could be dark - but when everybody in the press was talking about the end of techno, we were having the greatest parties on earth.'
Hell founded Gigolo in Munich in 1996 and put out releases aimed directly at the dancefloor. Although the label specialised in house, electro and techno - Hell himself is a techno producer - it was electro-clash that surged forward as the soundtrack to the turn of the millennium. As the 2000s got under way, electro-clash began to run out of steam. Hell capped off the whole thing with a grim studio album, 2003's NY Muscle, which brought to mind post-apocalyptic cityscapes more than the glammed decadence of electro-clash past.