Welcome to the 16th edition of my mail-outs, all of which have been archived here. Please find an overview of my recent articles and radio features as well as some assorted/unsorted recommendations below. Again I specifically point it out if a piece is available in an official or my own English translation.

+++++ Stuff That I Published

— Pretty much exactly 30 years ago, a Dutch label first invited touring bands and artists to do one-off recordings during their stays in Amsterdam. After a few years, it started to bring together different bands and artists for one-off collaborations. Tortoise and The Ex. Low and Dirty Three. Isis and Aereogramme. Sparklehorse and Fennesz. In the Fishtank became a highly influential recording series over time and especially those last two albums were of real importance to me. Hence, I was more than chuffed when I was given the green light to tell the series’ history (English/German) as well as pick and review ten crucial releases from its slim catalogue (English/German) for HHV-Mag. 

— Speaking of stuff that really left an imprint on me, when Beyoncé dropped Lemonade ten years ago on April 23rd, 2016, that was a capital E event. In a year that was chock-full of blockbuster pop albums that seemed to both distill and propel forward the 2016 zeitgeist, it stood out as a multi-format gesamtkunstwerk as well as a … perfect marketing product that sent out a highly ambiguous message, really. For HHV-Mag (German/English), I re-assessed it through the rearview mirror of history and came back with some sobering thoughts.

— Did you know that Lemonade and Spotify share a birthday ten years apart? That’s right, Daniel Ek and Martin Lorentzon founded their company—originally using music as a honeypot to attract eyeballs/ears for advertisers—on April 23rd, 2006. I spoke with Spotify Teardown co-author Rasmus Fleischer and received some written answers to my question from the company’s Head of Music for Central Europe, Conny Zhang, for a radio piece for Deutschlandradio’s Corso (combined with an interview with Clouds Hill’s Johann Scheerer) that was later broadcast at DLF Kultur’s Tonart (available as a stand-alone piece) as well as an article for der Freitag (archived) about how the company and its platform has changed over those two decades and is slowly on its way to become aneverything app for cultural consumption that you can now talk to because that hasn’t been a thing for more than a decade or so.

— I followed up on this with another shorter piece for der Freitag (archived) about Spotify’s top 20 most-streamed albums and songs of all time. While those are strictly from the 21st century and with one exception—Coldplay’s »Yellow« from 2000—from the 2010s and 2020s, these records and singles do not at all counter the trend of people listening to more deep catalogue (i.e., stuff that is at least ten years old) at all, I argue. More importantly, they tell us that the times in which pop culture served as a unifying force are over. It’s all hyper-personalised and micro-niche’d from here on, etc., but at least you are now able to talk to your music app.

— One thing that Spotify gets a lot of flak for though it is happening everywhere is what I have described as an AI-powered cuckoo’s egg strategy, i.e. fraudsters publishing slop on the official streaming profiles of smaller and mid-tier artists. I spoke with Tara Nome Doyle and Gesine Schönrock from Cologne’s finest, Kompakt, to whom this has happened recently, to once more explain how the whole thing works in my first radio piece for WDR5’s Töne, Texte, Bilder (individual piece/whole show, my part starts at the 22-minute-mark), and also wrote an in-depth piece for der Freitag (archived) about it. Since readers were apparently interested in this story, I followed up on that with a shorter explainer on how AI helps fraudsters to siphon off ad revenue from independent artists via YouTube’s Content ID system for der Freitag (archived), too. These aren’t even the only schemes that musicians have to put up with these days. Welcome to the scamscape that is music streaming, something that you can now enjoy by talking to an app.

— Speaking of music and streaming, the Warner Music Group has entered a, erm, »creative partnership« with Netflix. WMG will commission the production company Unigram (coincidentally financed by Access Holdings, which owns …. Wouldn’t ya guess it, WMG!) to produce music documentaries for them and then, as part of a »multi-year first-look deal,« let Netflix call dibs on them. Over at Deutschlandradio’s Corso, I discussed with Christoph Reimann how both companies benefit from that, and how it will allow WMG and its artists to have more control over the narrative. And you thought Geese were baddies, huh? 

— Speaking of which, in case you haven’t heard / have not been on the internet last month, the marketing agency Chaotic Good apparently ran digital campaigns for Geese and their lead-singer Cameron Winter’s latest albums. According to a Billboard interview with the two co-founders of the company, Chaotic Good employs a broad range of TikTok profiles—thousands, as they say at one point—to generate hype and manufacture consent around artists from their roster, which includes Justin Bieber, Laufey, and Wet Leg, and many more—but people got really pissed at Geese. Over at DLF Kultur’s Tonart, I spoke with Carsten Beyer about how the music industry has a long history of unethical and downright illegal marketing strategies, and that I think focussing on Geese individualises a structural problem—a problem that Shaad D’Souza has explored in much more detail over at the Guardian. (Sidenote, because that is rarely ever brought up: Geese are signed to Partisan—since late 2024 distributed by Virgin, i.e. Universal Music Group—and [PIAS]—acquired in, of course, late 2024 by Universal Music Group—which means that they are backed by the most powerful music company in the world. They are not an indie band, and the not-indie companies that want to profit from their success do not care about indie ethics.) To paraphrase a snappy one-liner often attributed to Slavoj Žižek: You don’t hate Geese, you hate capitalism. 

— Moving away from digital media, did anyone here attend Record Store Day this year? I proudly haven’t done so since maybe 2009 or so. Over at DLF Kultur’s Tonart, I discussed the disconnect between the vinyl boom and rising prices that make independent record stores suffer the most with Andreas Müller, having spoken to Making Vinyl’s Andreas Kohl and Berlin-Spandau’s finest Musicland store in advance.

— And speaking of records, for HHV-Mag I have reviewed Whitney Johnson, Lia Kohl & Macie Stewart’s Body Sound (English/German). 

+++++ Some Unsorted Recommendations

Does the name Robert Turman ring a bell? If so, you are likely thinking of Flux, the self-released 1981 album that was reissued in 2012 through Editions Mego’s Spectrum Spools sub-label to great fanfare. The record saw the NON co-founder (yikes!) eschew his industrial background in favour of a sort of DIY post-minimal music he made with kalimba and piano, drum machines and tape loops. It is very soothing and incredibly melancholic at the same time—essentially, proto-hauntology music. However, Turman’s real magnum opus, if only in terms of scale, was the also self-released Chapter Eleven 8MC release in 1987 that featured tracks made between 1976 and 1987, including some Flux material. A lot of the tunes are very clearly in dialogue with both the minimal music lineage as well as the burgeoning (post-)industrial and noise scenes in which Turman himself had a crucial role, so they revolve around loops and abrasive sounds. But Turman went further than that, which led to some downright visionary moments. »Cube Root« sounds like an homage to Manuel Göttsching that was recorded before E2-E4 had even been released, »Four Jump Cut« applies Reichian methodologies to electronic equipment, »Orbital Decay« is straight-up synth-punk, »Ejecta« calls to mind the Ströer Bros, »Masking Fish« Bee Mask, and »Radius« William Basinski’s most beautiful works, before the compilation gets downright prophetic near the end. »Into the Grave« sounds as if Richard Horowitz had paid a few visits to the Danceteria, and am I crazy or could »Thick Ice« totally pass as a Selected Ambient Works 85-92 B-side? You’ll be the one to decide that, but I hope you make it all the way through until the majestically sinister drone-noise extravaganza that is »Vice,« the release’s 23-½-minute-long closing track. I hadn’t heard Chapter Eleven for a few years, and was so floored when I revisited it at first that I immediately played the whole thing again—we’re talking about 45 tracks with a total run-time of 4-½ hours. It is time well spent. This to me is some of the best music on earth. (Turman is still at it, and I also loved his latest, A Day in the Life, by the way.) This weekend, some 30+ labels are raising money on Bandcamp for humanitarian aid for the Lebanese civil society. After years of hardship and multiple crises, many people are currently displaced and the situation in Beirut is apparently very dire. If you want to support some artists from the country’s incredibly rich music scene and don’t know where to start, I recommended ten albums over at Mastodon. When I made that quick list, I realised that I had seen two of those artists at Berlin’s nomadic Kiezsalon event series, which returns on May 22nd and 23rd for yet another season. I am looking forward to the opening gigs at Schloss Britz with Andrea Belfi & Jules Reidy, Maggie Nichols, and more. And because it has been a while since I shared some food recommendations and recipes in this part of my mail-outs, here is an old one. I have recently remembered one of my go-to dishes for when I was feeling lazy but didn’t want to feel like I was feeling lazy—prep time is ten minutes tops, the benefits linger longer. 

You’ll need:

• olive oil
• salt and pepper 
• a can of chick peas, rinsed
• ground cumin, cilantro, paprika, chili, etc.
• two sweet potatoes 
• two handfuls of tomatoes 
• fresh parsley 
• balsamico cream
• hummus
• half a lemon
• brown sugar or maple syrup
• optionally apple vinegar
• optionally pomegranate (alternatively pickled beet roots) 
• optionally fresh cilantro 

You’ll do:

1. Toss the chick peas in oil and the spices as well as salt and pepper; slice the sweet potatoes in halves and glaze them with some oil. Put both—ideally the chick peas first as they take longer—in the oven for about 15 to 20 minutes (25 if you like your chick peas very crunchy and your sweet potatoes very mushy) at around 180°C.
2. Dice the tomatoes and chop some parsley and toss both with oil, a bit of balsamico cream as well as salt and pepper
3. Combine the hummus with the juice of half a lemon and sugar/maple syrup as well as salt, pepper, maybe some spices and apple vinegar as well as a bit hot water that you add while whisking until the consistency feels right (creamy but still a little runny is ideal, I think)
4. Once the chick peas and sweet potatoes are done, slap some of that hummus cream on them, and then add tomato salad as well as pomegranate or beet root as well as cilantro for extra flavour/colour
5. Enjoy a quick, simple, and cost-effective meal that looks sort of fancy and is very flavourful but didn’t even make you break a sweat

Thank you for your attention and until next time.