Stefan Dumbbell

Shantel at the Danube Island Festival 2008

Shantel & Bucovina Club Orkestar, Detmold Summer Stage 2015

Stefan Hantel (born March 2, 1968 in Mannheim ) is a German musician , music producer and DJ who is known by the stage name Shantel . The 2003 and 2005 on his label Essay Recordings published Bucovina Club - compilations that contain a selection of modern interpretation of Eastern European dance music, he ranks among the world's most popular representatives of the Balkan pop .

Live and act

Stefan Hantel's grandparents (on his mother's side) came from Bukovina , they lived in Chernivtsi . His paternal grandfather was Greek. Shantel began his music career as a percussionist and driver in a Greek band. In November 1987 he began to organize parties in Frankfurt's Bahnhofsviertel. He published among others with the record label Studio K7 . In 1991 he lived temporarily in Paris, where he studied graphic design, but was also active as a DJ. After returning to Germany, he opened a club in Frankfurt am Main. In 1994 he founded the label Essay Recordings together with Daniel Haaksman , which they put on hold for several years after Haaksman moved to Berlin in 1998. In 2001 he produced the song Inside together with MC Mike Romeo , which became known primarily through numerous publications on various compilations and its use in the Aktion Mensch commercial .

In 2001, Hantel took a trip to his grandparents' hometown, Chernivtsi. He began to be interested in Eastern European cultures and music and increasingly let this influence his musical work as a DJ and producer. In 2002 he reactivated the music label with Haaksman and released the compilation "Bucovina Club", the title of which he put together and z. T. remixed . He then gathered well-known representatives of Eastern European music such as Fanfare Ciocărlia , Balkan Beat Box and the Sandy Lopicic Orkestar , thereby promoting their popularity in Western Europe.

The CD sold well all over the world and as a result some titles on the CD were used for film soundtracks and commercials. The title Bucovina was heard in the film Alles auf Zucker (2004), among other things , but also in commercials. Also for the globally successful film Borat (2007) by the British comedian Sacha Baron Cohen , Shantel contributed a title from the Bucovina Club compilation to the soundtrack with Mahalageasca (Bucovina Dub) . The success of the CD prompted Shantel to release a sequel entitled Bucovina Club 2 . In addition, Shantel has been performing at concerts since then, for which he founded the Bucovina Club Orkestar , which enables live voicing of the songs he produces.

Since the reactivation of his music label in 2003, he has also signed a number of Eastern European music groups or music groups influenced by Eastern European music, some of which he got to know on his trips to Eastern Europe.

While Shantel's early productions were more downbeat , he has been mixing electronic sounds of East and Southeast European music as a DJ since his 2001 trip to Eastern Europe . The influences can be attributed to the traditional music of Southeast Europe, in particular it takes up elements of Romanian , Albanian , Greek and also Slavic music. Hantel also pays special attention to Yiddish klezmer and the music of the Roma and Sinti . Wind instruments are often used as an essential feature.

The ZDF magazine Aspects reported on the musician in 2005 and accompanied him on a trip to the former beech country (Bukowina) in search of traces of his ancestors. In 2006 Shantel worked as a musician in the project Encounters - An Alliance for Children by Peter Maffay . In the same year Hantel produced the album Alles Lost by the musician Rainer Binder-Krieglstein .

Shantel with Bucovina Club Orkestar at the TFF Rudolstadt 2012

In August 2007, Hantel released the solo album Disko Partizani . The lyrics are mostly in English and the tempo of the pieces is a bit slower, although the driving "Balkan rhythm" is retained as a basic element. For the recordings he hired well-known instrumentalists, including Marko Marković , the son of trumpeter Boban Marković . The singers are the Balkan R&B singer Miss Platnum , the Canadian Brenna MacCrimmon , who is known as an interpreter of Turkish music, and Vesna Petković , who sings in the Sandy Lopicic Orkestar, among others. In Austria, Disko Partizani entered the album sales charts at number 17 on September 14th. In October 2007 Disko Partizani was number 1 in the European World Music Charts, which are not, however, a sales chart, but the result of a jury of European world music radio hosts. The soundtrack for the multi-award-winning feature film On the Other Side (2007) by German-Turkish director Fatih Akın is also by Shantel. The singles Disko Partizani and Disko Boy were internationally successful, for example in Romania, Poland and Turkey (top 10 of the international hit parade).

On August 28th, 2009 his album Planet Paprika came out. On April 9, 2010 the Maxi Authentic ep appeared on all digital platforms. In 2010 he was one of the first German artists to appear at the Guča Trumpet Festival in Serbia . In 2011 he published the sampler Kosher Nostra, which was put together with Oz Almog .

As a film composer for Fatih Akin's film “ On the Other Side ”, Shantel had already dealt with Turkish musical traditions. In addition, his concert appearances and albums there were particularly popular in the country, he had double platinum awards for the album Disko Partizani (2007) in Turkey. The title track was used for years as a jingle for broadcasts of soccer ball games in all Turkish leagues. He had a second home in the Kadiköy district of Istanbul . It is surprising that in May 2020 he will be releasing an album that not only celebrates the metropolis on the Bosporus with the title Istanbul . The album was created together with the backing band Cümbüş Cemaat , whose members, all session musicians, wrote new texts on his electronically modified adaptations of folk music melodies and recorded them with him.

Discography

Shantel's first albums Club Guerilla and Auto Jumps & Remixes were released on the INFRACom label ! . The following albums, Higher than the Funk and Great Delay , appeared on Studio K7 . After that he only released Essay Recordings on his own label .

Albums

year	title	Top ranking, total weeks, awardChart placementsChart placements (Year, title, rankings, weeks, awards, notes)			Remarks
year	title	DE	AT	CH	Remarks
2005	Bucovina Club Vol. 2	-	AT54 (4 weeks) AT	-	First published: June 2005 compilation
2007	Partizani disco	DE63 (1 week) DE	AT17 (7 weeks) AT	-	First published: August 2007
2009	Planet paprika	DE71 (1 week) DE	AT55 (1 week) AT	CH74 (1 week) CH	First published: August 2009
2011	Kosher Nostra	-	AT35 (2 weeks) AT	-	First published: May 2011 with Oz Almog
2015	Viva Diaspora	DE76 (1 week) DE	-	CH99 (1 week) CH	First published: September 2015