Across three decades, Robag Wruhme (Gabor Schablitzki) has built a musical language of tiny gestures that somehow move whole rooms. He came up through Thuringia’s post-Wall underground, matured on Pampa and Kompakt, and now curates his own Tulpa Ovi imprint, a career arc that treats house and techno as spaces for intimacy, wit and afterglow. On Friday, October 17, the groove-maestro himself graces Control Club's Room 1.
Following his roots back to East Germany, before clubs and compilations, there was breakdancing, record hunting, and electronic tinkering. In the ’90s, Robag cut his teeth with the IDM-leaning project Beefcake. By the end of the decade, he had teamed with Sören Bodner (Monkey Maffia) to form Wighnomy Brothers, orbiting the Freude am Tanzen collective and pushing a funkier, eccentric strain of minimal/tech-house across 12 s and marathon DJ sets. Their profile rose with the microhouse tide and even made it into Amy Grill’s documentary Speaking in Code, a time capsule of the era. Born in Rudolstadt in 1974 and raised in Apolda before moving to Jena, Wruhme’s East German coming-of-age feeds the tactile swing that still runs through his work. His long-standing ties to Jena’s Kassablanca, a crucible for the Freude am Tanzen scene, anchor that origin story.
Releases for Freude am Tanzen/Musik Krause and Kompakt’s Speicher series captured the Wighnomy Brothers’ oddball swing and crate-digging sensibility. They were gleefully unruly, feeding back the crowd’s energy while keeping a mischievous engineer’s hand on the details. When Bodner passed away in 2024, the tributes that followed underlined how deeply the Wighnomys’ DIY East-German chapter resonated across Europe's club culture.
This solo output arrived early and fully formed with Wuzzelbud “KK” (Musik Krause, 2004), right at the peak of minimal, using micro-edits and bone-dry drums to sketch humane, groovy shapes. The hinge came in 2011, and it swung both ways. First, the mix Wuppdeckmischmampflow, for Kompakt reframed his selector’s instinct as collage. Then Thora Vukk on DJ Koze’s Pampa recast the studio as a listening room: field recordings, melancholy piano figures, softly bumping drums, and “Brücke” interludes that paced the album like bridges between scenes. Taken together, the mix and the LP codified the two poles he’s balanced ever since: curator of mood and builder of tools. Between those bookends came a sharp standalone single, “Donnerkuppel” (2011), and a late-2010s pivot back to Kompakt with the Topinambur EP (2019).
In 2021, he pushed that curator role into the streaming era with Connecting The Dots. This rights-cleared Kompakt DJ mix opens the label’s deep catalogue for narrative, long-form storytelling, and compensates the original producers for the tracks used. It plays like a love letter to Cologne’s archive and a quiet manifesto for doing mixes ethically online.
The Kompakt Speicher run that followed reaffirmed his peak-time instincts. Speicher 115 (2020) paired the lean chant of “Yes” with “Calma Calma.” Speicher 117 (2021) doubled down with the emphatic “No” and the tunnelling “Frontex Frappant.” Subsequent entries kept this conversation going, among them Speicher 123 (2022) and, most recently, Speicher 132 (2024), which even slipped in a collaboration with Bruno Pronsato.
His album Wuzzelbud FF (2018, Hart & Tief) was a deliberate step back toward his rowdier side, while Venq Tolep (2019, Pampa) became his most wistful record, threading wordless vocals, strings and pillowy pads into ambient-house drift. Heard back-to-back, the two releases sketch the span of his palette: mischievous peak-time on one hand, quietly cinematic suites on the other.
Independence sharpened the profile further when, in 2021, he launched Tulpa Ovi, a boutique imprint for the playfully personal, with digital EPs like Spoddy Spy and Avo Thal arriving in quick succession and culminating in T.O.R. LP 001 (2023) on vinyl. The label feels restless, small-scale, and comfortable on the side streets of genre, providing him a flexible lane for experiments. Under Tulpa Ovi, he’s also issued compact, left-field sketches such as the "Bortonkk_21 EP" (2022). Beyond “Robag Wruhme,” he has worked under aliases including Rolf Oksen and Die Dub Rolle.
As a remixer, he’s prized for widening a song’s emotional bandwidth. The lunging 4/4 edit of Moderat’s “Bad Kingdom” became a late-night staple. Years earlier, he’d already mapped that tender pressure on Ellen Allien & Apparat’s “Way Out,” teasing the vocal into new contours. His 2012 suite for Dntel reframed delicate indietronica with micro-etched swing; around the same time, his recut of Extrawelt’s “Neuland” turned a techno engine into a glimmering sketch. And in 2015, he pulled a warm, suspended ache from Flight Facilities’ “Two Bodies.” In April 2025, he delivered “Permanent (Robag Wruhme Ruinalta Forli Remix)” for Agustin Giri & Gespona, a sleek, deconstructed reworking very much in his current, melodic-hypnotic lane.
His public trail of mixes mirrors that same elastic logic outside the studio: an eclectic 2011 RA.256 that drifts from hip-hop to chillwave; an XLR8R podcast the same year that all but abandons percussion for a “good night” glide; Olgamikks for Nachtdigital (2012), stitched from Kompakt-adjacent favourites; a Circoloco Radio episode to open 2024; and a Kompakt Club Mix tied to Total 24 recorded live at Fi in Cologne.
What Robag Wruhme has argued, record after record and night after night, is that leaving space invites feeling. He has bridged the rough-edged minimal of the 2000s, the album-centric warmth of the 2010s and a present in which big rooms still make space for detail. DJs trust him for elegant peak-time gear. Listeners trust him for records that linger. Somewhere between the side street and the main square, he keeps finding the human angle.
