There is a particular kind of artist who arrives at a crossroads in their career and decides that the only way forward is to build something entirely their own. TJ Hertz, who records and performs as Objekt, reached that moment in October 2024 when he launched Kapsela, a new record label named after a childhood toy: translucent plastic spheres made up of modular components that could be reconfigured into endless forms. The metaphor was fitting for an artist who has spent fifteen years building a practice around the refusal to stay fixed in one place.
A Sound That Never Chose a Side
Born in Tokyo and raised across Belgium and the UK before settling in Berlin in 2009, Hertz built his early reputation through a series of white label 12 inches and a landmark debut on Hessle Audio in 2012. His track Cactus arrived at a moment when the conversation around club music was particularly fractured, with scenes drawing hard lines between techno and dubstep, between house and electro. Hertz ignored those lines entirely.
His early records moved between bass weight and mechanical precision in ways that felt genuinely new. Critics reached for compound genre terms because no single one was adequate. What made the music work was not its eclecticism but its internal coherence: every Objekt record had a structural integrity that transcended whatever scene it might nominally belong to.
The PAN Years and the Art of Restraint
His two albums on PAN, Flatland in 2014 and Cocoon Crush in 2018, cemented his reputation as one of the most serious thinkers in contemporary electronic music. Both records rewarded close listening in a way that most club music does not. Cocoon Crush in particular was widely discussed for its integration of psychedelic texture and percussive complexity: a record that felt as comfortable in a listening room as it did in a late night club set.
What those years also demonstrated was a willingness to move slowly. Between the two albums and a handful of 12 inches in between, Hertz was not a prolific artist by club music standards. Each release felt considered and necessary. He gave interviews rarely, performed selectively, and maintained a commitment to craft that made each appearance feel like an event.
The Launch of Kapsela
When Hertz announced Kapsela in the autumn of 2024, the move was framed not as a reaction against anything but as a positive step toward a different kind of creative momentum. He spoke in interviews about wanting to release music more frequently, to reduce the pressure that accumulates around each individual record when the gap between releases stretches to years.
The label launched with a reissue of Ganzfeld, a track that originally appeared on Flatland a decade earlier. This time it came with remixes from Djrum, Piezo, and Ulla: three artists whose work sits at various edges of the experimental club landscape. The selection was a statement about community and context. Kapsela would not just be a vehicle for his own music but a home for artists whose work he considered in genuine conversation with his own.
Three weeks later came Chicken Garaage, the first new Objekt EP in two years. The A side took its name from a meal Hertz ate in Melbourne while on tour: a piece of fried chicken that became the conceptual anchor for music that nodded toward the early UK garage and dubstep sounds of the early 2000s. The B side, Worm Dance, drew its source material from field recordings made at a lake house outside Berlin in 2022, building an entirely different kind of architecture from natural sound.
The Visual Work
For all his reputation as a producer and DJ, Hertz has engaged with the visual dimension of his practice in ways that reward attention. The music video for Dazzle Anew, directed by filmmaker and animator Joji Koyama, remains the most sustained expression of his aesthetic in a format outside audio. Koyama built a world of layered animation and live performance around the music, with choreographer and performer Kiani Del Valle moving through spaces that seemed to exist between abstraction and physical reality.
The collaboration with visual artist Ezra Miller on a full AV show in 2019 extended this territory further. That touring production, which appeared at festivals including Unsound and Atonal, presented his sound in a context that emphasized its spatial qualities: the way his music constructs and deconstructs physical environments through rhythm and texture.
The B2B Tradition
Hertz has maintained a long standing partnership with the artist known as Call Super, and their back to back sets have become some of the more anticipated events in the European club calendar. Where Hertz tends toward structural weight and mechanical drive, Call Super brings a more fluid and psychedelic energy, and the dialogue between their approaches produces something neither would arrive at alone.
This dimension of his practice points toward something important about how Hertz understands the DJ set: not as a solo performance but as a form of conversation, with the crowd, with the space, and when the opportunity presents itself, with another selector whose taste challenges and extends his own.
What Kapsela Means Now
By spring 2026, Kapsela had expanded beyond its founder. Releases from Tristan Arp and Sepehr had established the label's range and confirmed that Hertz was serious about building a genuine roster rather than a vanity platform. The label's aesthetic was consistent without being restrictive: music that took the club as a starting point and found out what happened when you pushed past its edges.
For an artist who built his reputation on restraint and selectivity, the decision to accelerate and build a label and release more music and create more infrastructure was a meaningful shift. It suggested not that Hertz had changed his values but that he had found a structure capable of supporting them at a different pace.
The toy he named his label after was designed to be taken apart and reassembled. That quality, the capacity for transformation without loss of coherence, turns out to be a precise description of what he has always made.
