Inside Rawax Records, Robert Drewek's Frankfurt House Family

Most labels pick a lane. Rawax picked eight. Since 2011, the Frankfurt imprint founded by Robert Drewek has grown from a single vinyl series into a family of sublabels covering Chicago house reissues, Detroit-style deep house, dub techno, and a dedicated Ricardo Villalobos catalog, all run out of the same distributor's office on Schielestr. 43. In 2026, Rawax turns 15, and the anniversary events on the calendar, a party at Frankfurt's Museum of Modern Electronic Music, another with DJ Hell in Wiesbaden, say more about what the label actually is than any press release could: a working relationship between a distributor, a record shop's worth of vintage catalogs, and a DJ who never really stopped being one.

From Frankfurt's Clubs to the A&R Desk

Robert Drewek's own history in dance music goes back to 1994, when he was pulled into Frankfurt's club scene through two rooms that shaped an entire generation of German techno, XS and Omen. He was DJing seriously by 1997, opening for DJ Hell and Dave Clark at Mannheim's MS Connexion, and held a resident DJ slot at Frankfurt's Monza club from 2004 to 2007 while touring Germany and Europe more broadly. He started releasing his own productions around 2004, through the labels i220, UNLEASH, and HOUSEWORX.

The more consequential job, in retrospect, was the one behind the scenes. From 2000 to 2007, Drewek worked at the music distributor ELP Medien in Offenbach, managing label accounts for Marco Carola, Adam Beyer, The Advent, Eric Prydz, and Jesper Dahlbäck, a job that put him inside the machinery of how techno records actually reach shops and DJs, years before he ran that machinery himself.

Building DBH Music

At the end of 2007, Drewek left ELP Medien and, with Alex Bau and Jörg Henze, founded a new distributor of his own: DBH Music, its name literally built from the three founders' initials. Rawax, the label, followed in 2011, and its Bandcamp debut, Unbroken Dub's Untitled Dubs, set the tone early. Resident Advisor's review at the time called it "already excellent," and flagged that more EPs were already queued behind it, a fair preview of what Rawax would become: less a single artistic vision than a steady, high-volume pipeline of vinyl.

A Family of Labels, Not One Sound

What makes Rawax genuinely unusual is how it subdivided itself. Chiwax carries Chicago house, including a Classic Edition series built around reissues. Housewax, Dubwax, Electrowax, and Microwax each stake out their own corner. Regional identity gets its own imprints too: Rawax Motor City Edition leans into Detroit's deep house lineage, Rawax West Coast Edition does the same for the American West Coast, and Rawax 069 Edition is named for Frankfurt's own telephone area code. An Aira Series ran five volumes between 2015 and 2016, pairing Ricardo Villalobos and Oskar Szafraniec with Ron Trent, Fred P, and Barac.

Villalobos's relationship with the label eventually earned him something rarer: his own dedicated series, launched in January 2024 and opened with a 25th-anniversary reissue of "808 The Bassqueen," originally released on Lo-Fi Stereo in 1999. Drewek's own words on the launch, given to the German magazine Groove, read less like marketing copy than an actual friendship on the record: "We are big fans, and we're proud to present Ricardo Villalobos properly." The two go back further than the label does. Drewek first booked Villalobos in 1994, for a Wednesday afterhours party called barfly's day at Auerbachs Keller in Bensheim, three decades before either of them had a reason to put that history in a press release.

Reissue Specialists With Real Credibility

Resident Advisor's own description of the label is blunt and, on the evidence, accurate: "a Frankfurt family of labels that mostly represses sought-after vintage house." Chiwax Classic Edition's reissue of Virgo Four's Let Me Take You There puts a genuine piece of Chicago house history back into circulation for buyers who missed it the first time. Atom Heart's Milagro EP, reissued on Rawax in 2015, had reached what RA called "holy grail" collector status since its original 1994 run on Rough Trade Germany's Roughmix imprint. In 2026, the label went further up the reissue food chain entirely, remastering DJ Hell's debut album Geteert und Gefedert for a new pressing. "We're really happy to make this album accessible to a new generation of record lovers," Drewek said of the project, adding a detail that says something about how seriously the label treats its archival work: "All sides now have equal runtime to ensure consistent audio quality and volume."

The Discography, Beyond the Reissues

Rawax's new-production side runs in parallel, and it leans toward rolling, groove-first house and techno rather than anything peak-time or aggressive. Rick Wade's Mystic Tech EP, the 20th volume of the Rawax Motor City Edition series, carries a real Detroit deep house pedigree. Enzo Siragusa, founder of London's influential FUSE party and label, paired with Seb Zito for a showcase-series release in 2017. Boo Williams, a genuine Chicago house veteran, split an EP with Simoncino on a joint Chiwax and Rawax release in 2018. More recently, Fort Romeau's Come Closer EP has been sitting among the label's current popular releases on Beatport.

Source: Bandcamp (dbh-music.bandcamp.com), Resident Advisor, and Discogs catalog listings for Rawax and its sublabels.

Fifteen Years In, Still a Distributor's Label

What ties all of this together is that Rawax was never built as one producer's vanity project. It grew directly out of Drewek's years inside ELP Medien and the distribution business he built afterward with DBH Music, and that origin shows in how the label actually operates: eight-plus sublabels, a genuine reissue program, and a catalog that treats Chicago, Detroit, and Frankfurt's own scene as equally worth preserving. That approach lines up with a broader shift the industry data backs up: independent labels now hold 44 percent of the US recorded music market, the highest share on record, and a 15-year-old distributor-label hybrid like Rawax is close to the ground-level version of that number. It also depends on a supply chain under real strain. Reissue-heavy labels are especially exposed to the vinyl pressing capacity crunch that has independent labels waiting six to nine months for pressing slots, and Rawax's entire identity runs on vinyl. The Motor City Edition series, meanwhile, sits in the same lineage documented in Movement Festival's 20th anniversary and Detroit's own techno history, one more European label paying its dues to where the sound actually started, not unlike how Cocoon Recordings built a 25-year run out of Frankfurt's neighboring club scene.

FAQ

Who owns Rawax Records?

Rawax was founded by Robert Drewek, a Frankfurt-based DJ and A&R who previously managed label accounts at the distributor ELP Medien before co-founding DBH Music with Alex Bau and Jörg Henze at the end of 2007.

When was Rawax founded?

Rawax launched in 2011 as part of DBH Music, the Frankfurt distributor Drewek co-founded a few years earlier. The label marks its 15th anniversary in 2026 with events in Frankfurt and Wiesbaden.

What sublabels does Rawax run?

Rawax's family includes Chiwax, Housewax, Dubwax, Electrowax, Microwax, and regionally themed imprints Rawax Motor City Edition, Rawax West Coast Edition, and Rawax 069 Edition, alongside a dedicated Ricardo Villalobos series launched in 2024.

Is Rawax mainly a reissue label?

A large part of its reputation is built on reissues, including Resident Advisor's own description of it as a label that "mostly represses sought-after vintage house." Chiwax Classic Edition and the Atom Heart and DJ Hell reissue projects are the clearest examples, though the label also releases new productions.

What is Robert Drewek's connection to Ricardo Villalobos?

The two have worked together since 1994, when Drewek booked Villalobos for a Wednesday afterhours party in Bensheim, Germany. That relationship led to Villalobos releasing two EPs on Rawax in 2020 and getting his own dedicated series on the label starting in 2024.