Rich ‘Ulee’ Rauschenberger has stories to tell. His latest is painful. A slipped disc, six days in hospital, nerve damage in one leg. So when DJ Mag finds him in June, he’s spent most of the year away from one of Cologne’s most famous electronic music venues. That’s a difficult position to be in when you’re one of the key figures behind it. Together with Sascha Weber, Rauschenberger was instrumental in transforming a former dock building on the banks of the Rhine into a landmark for big-room dance styles. Founded in 2004, Bootshaus has developed into a juggernaut for EDM, hardstyle, dubstep and techno, emerging parallel to the era of dance music’s highest-quality productions. Today, the industrial multi-room address is equipped with systems from L’Acoustics, SEEBURG and Funktion-One, rotating ceiling turbines, flamethrowers, CO2 cannons and much more.

“It was actually three venues. One was called the Warehouse and was a real techno club that was kind of crap because of the interior and the technical equipment. But a lot of big people played there,” Rauschenberger recalls. “Then it became Dock 8, which was a bit more upscale for the time. The sound system was better, but it definitely wasn’t cool. Maybe you wanted to get in a fight and get killed, that was the place to hang out. When it was renamed the Bootshaus, it almost had to do a 180-degree turn from what it was.

“It took a bit of time for us to have an identity, and it wasn’t there in the beginning,” says Rauschenberger, explaining how it took a while for the team to slim down, become “tighter” and find the right direction. The first party to reflect a new focus on music was Loonyland, from where he and Weber began to make a name for themselves. “I was part of the team then and I’m still here because I decided to go the musical route. The only party that reflected that (initially) was Loonyland, and from then on the owner decided to have a lot of evenings with music.”