Producer & DJ · Berlin, Germany
Answer Code Request
Patrick Gräser built Answer Code Request into Ostgut Ton's second generation, then took eight years to make Halo, his most personal album yet.
Patrick Gräser and Marcel Dettmann grew up in the same small East German town, met at a skate park as kids, and used to travel into Berlin together as teenagers to buy records. That friendship is the reason Answer Code Request exists at all, and it explains something real about why Gräser's music has always sat close to the center of Berlin's techno establishment without ever quite settling into it.
A GDR Childhood and a Detour Through Java
Gräser was born in 1980 in Fürstenwalde, a small town roughly half an hour outside Berlin, in what was then East Germany. His father owned an RFT hi-fi system and DDR prog-rock records, and Gräser and his older brother got pulled into hip-hop and breakdance culture after seeing the film Beat Street around age nine or ten, ordering records from Berlin's Hard Wax and Delirium shops soon after. He wanted to DJ from the age of twelve or thirteen, started producing under his own name in 2007, and briefly studied media informatics before dropping out. "Programming in Java... wasn't for me," he has said. In the years before Answer Code Request existed, he worked as a bartender, built furniture for party rentals, and did label work at Rotation Records.
Escape Myself
Gräser moved to Berlin permanently in 2001, at 20. He had been sending Dettmann demos for years, and Dettmann eventually founded a sublabel, MDR, specifically to release his friend's debut. The breakthrough came before the record did: Dettmann played the unreleased track "Escape Myself," written during a bleak stretch in a cramped flat on Anklamer Strasse after a downstairs domestic dispute brought the police, to a packed Panorama Bar floor in 2011. A stranger on the dancefloor asked the still-anonymous Gräser if it was his track. He said no. It surfaced properly a few months later on the self-released Subway Into EP, sold out at Hard Wax within weeks, and Gräser's identity became public around six months after that, outed on a Chris Liebing podcast.
Ostgut Ton's Second Generation
Gräser debuted on Ostgut Ton in 2012 and became a Berghain resident shortly after, releasing two albums that Resident Advisor would later call "high watermarks of the Ostgut Ton catalogue": Code in 2014 and Gens in 2018, the latter's title track built partly from field recordings of his own children. Even inside that catalogue, Gräser pushed against being read as a straight 4/4 techno artist. "When I hear only straight 4/4 techno there's nothing for me," he told Resident Advisor in 2018. "I want to show it's not always about banging, dark music."
Eight Years, Two Labels, One Album
Gräser signed to Delsin in 2022, a move he later described plainly: "I wasn't able to produce much in 2018/2019. And in 2020/21, when the pandemic started, it was awful to produce... I thought it was time to take a new and different path. Delsin was the right choice at the right time." The Shattering EP that year was his first release in six years, followed by LED, a collaboration with Amotik, in 2024. Halo, released June 26, 2026, is his third album and first in eight years, though the gap was between albums specifically, not silence. "Halo is more personal than anything I've done before," Gräser said of the record. "I stopped thinking about context or expectations and focused purely on myself and the music. No concepts, no pressure, just the process and the feeling." Resident Advisor's review called him "one of the best producers of the past 20 years."
FAQ
Who is Answer Code Request?
Answer Code Request is Patrick Gräser, a Berlin-based producer and Berghain resident who came up through Marcel Dettmann's MDR label and released two albums, Code and Gens, on Ostgut Ton before moving to Delsin in 2022.
What is Answer Code Request's connection to Marcel Dettmann?
Dettmann and Gräser grew up in the same East German town and have been friends since childhood. Dettmann founded the sublabel MDR specifically to release Gräser's debut material as Answer Code Request.
What is Halo?
Halo is Answer Code Request's third studio album, released June 26, 2026 on Delsin, his first album in eight years following 2018's Gens on Ostgut Ton. He has described it as his most personal record to date.
Was Answer Code Request silent between 2018 and 2026?
No. While Halo is his first album in that span, he released the Shattering EP in 2022, his Delsin debut, and LED, a collaboration with Amotik, in 2024.
What labels has Answer Code Request released on?
He has released on Ostgut Ton, Marcel Dettmann Records, Delsin, Monkeytown Records, Music Man Records, and Skudge Records, among others, across a career that began with the self-released Subway Into EP in 2011.
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