Welcome to the 17th edition of my mail-outs, all of which have been archived on my website. 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

— AI slop is a glocal problem, first example: 17 Suno-generated songs that have been playing at the Honolulu airport since November. I did some research on this for taz and besides getting some quotes from Hawai’i’s Department of Transportation, I also talked with Roger Bong who runs the wonderful Aloha Got Soul label (all you funk, boogie, and AOR nerds should check out Maggie Herron and Aiko) and has released the Music for the Airport compilation in protest. Needless to say, this episode feels especially tone-deaf and historically loaded in a place like Hawai’i, as I argue in my piece and in a short audio feature for Klaus Walter’s recent taz mixtape for ByteFM.

— AI slop is a glocal problem, second example: The US white-boy reggae troupe Stick Figure released a song called »Angels Above Me« in 2019 that is just as generic as its title. It became an unlikely regional hit in South Africa after, according to the band’s manager, a Pretoria-based DJ had played it in lockdown live stream. Fast forward six years and someone throws it into Suno, types something like »turn this into a bigroom house/EDM banger« and uploaded this »cover version« to a South African TikTok account. »Run Run River« went through the roof and even became an international hit (I kid you not, three days ago I heard it at my local Späti). Stick Figure claimed to not have known about this and that they were not compensated for it until they were credited, meaning they managed to secure a royalty split after the fact. Over at WDR’s COSMO (not archived), I argued that we’ve seen this before—»Papaoutai,« anyone?—and that we will see it again. 

— And why do I think so? The problem that everyone in the music world has is, as usual, that they are not Taylor Swift, who is trying to get a trademark on two phrases and an image from her Eras tour in an obvious attempt to ensure that her voice and likeness cannot easily be AI-cloned, or that the Forbes billionaire can at least sue the fuck out of whoever tries to do just that. For der Freitag (archived), I wrote about the different legal issues of deepfakes and how both digital music distributors and streaming platforms aren’t helping much in combatting the proliferation of AI clones.

— In fact, Spotify now wants to enable paying customers to create AI »remixes« and/or »cover versions« of compositions and songs from the Universal Music Group catalogue if the respective artists have opted in for that. It is still unclear when this feature—rumours about which have now circulated for years—will be rolled out, however it would likely be the first fully licensed (at least in advance) major commercial genAI tool for music … creation, prosumption, how do we even call it? of its kind. Over at taz, I briefly wrote about Spotify and UMG’s goals of trying to reach even deeper into the pockets of so-called »superfans« in order to maximise Average Revenue Per User (ARPU) and/or keep shareholders happy through this »add-on,« but there and over at NDR Kultur (not archived) raised the question whether a substantial amount of listeners will be willing to spend extra money on that. I don’t think so, and I also don’t think that Spotify now wants to compete with the current genAI market leader in music, Suno—though UMG expanded its lawsuit against Suno a few days after the Spotify deal was disclosed. Previously, Lucian Grainge’s company—along with Sony Music Entertainment—sued Suno over an alleged 560 copyright infringements. They have since found 60.440 more cases. What a coinkydink!

— It is probably no surprise then that Suno expands into other business sectors. What the hell is this company doing with »concert discovery app« Songkick? To be fair, the—comparatively low-performing—Bandsintown competitor was sort of forced onto Suno when it struck its first and only licensing deal with Warner Music Group. But Suno seemingly tries to lean into it, as I discussed with Carsten Beyer over at DLF Kultur’s Tonart. That $ 5 billion USD valuation might look good on paper, but for some reason investors get a little nervous when your main product is built on mass-scale copyright infringement and the biggest companies in the game threaten to sue you into oblivion (see above), so some diversification is advised. — You know what’s truly diverse? The catalogue of the label slash event promoter slash festival slash radio operator Meakusma, which I have profiled for HHV-Mag (English/German). I am positively gutted to not be able to attend this year’s festival edition—what a line-up!—but I still have the music to enjoy at home: My favourite new Meakusma releases this year were Rave at Your Fictional Borders’ Analogue Nomadism (it doesn’t sound like you expect it to) and Radio Hito’s L’uso e gli attributi del cuore (my second-favourite Italian-language art pop record after Silvia Tarozzi’s Lucciole, which … well, I know two of those from 2026, but both are in really good company).

— Speaking of records, for the forthcoming issue of Making Vinyl’s English-language print magazine—available for pre-order now and for free, you only need to cover the shipping costs—I wrote about the massive, uncomfortable disconnect between jubilatory industry news about the growth of vinyl sales on the one hand and what that communicates to vinyl lovers faced with ever-rising consumer prices on the other. 

— I also wrote something about some records. For HHV-Mag, I reviewed the first part of the XKatedral Anthology Series (English/German), the two Japan-specific reissue compilations Far East New Rock Invention 1969–1975 (English/German) and Tokyo Pulse: Japanese Funk Modern & City Pop From The Tokyo Scene 1974–88 (English/German) as well as new albums by Jump Source (English/German), Yu Su (English/German), and—one of my favourite discoveries this year so far—Ts Bayandalai (English/German). For Musikexpress, I wrote some German-only words on new records by otay:onii and gamut inc. 

— Lastly, I was a guest on the Swedish Goethe-Institut’s Tsyklandspodden to talk about the club scene in Germany—and no, I didn’t do it in Swedish, but in English. We recorded this in December, and a lot has changed since then in Berlin especially. I think this conversation was also a sort of swan song for my own sorry career as a club music journalist.

+++++ Some Unsorted Recommendations

I recently watched the documentary Nobody Here. The Story of Vaporwave and while I didn’t exactly love it —amazing visuals but crude storytelling, overly affirmative about a lot of aspects while turning a blind eye to some problematic issues, etc.—it did make me jump headfirst into the rabbit hole that is the discography of desert sand feels warm night. As a definitive slushwave masterpiece, last year’s Vjaġġ tal-Qalb has been on heavy rotation since then. No samples were used or abused when it was made, but if you prefer your music to be even more »hand-made,« I recommend the new Kevin Morby album, Little Wide Open. Just like everyone else, I loved Harlem River and made some fond memories with Oh My God during an extended vacation in Vienna in the godforsaken year of 2020, but otherwise never cared much for his music. And well, these are folk/rock hybrids that at times feel a little epigonal/Dylanesque, but good songwriting is good songwriting, you know? Someone who didn’t write any songs and has nevertheless released yet another album is Alex Zhang Hungtai, about whose latest record—Dras for Shelter Press—I had raved last month. Its immediate follow-up Orion/Mother is a strictly improvised affair and absolutely fantastic. Also, I’ve read Meet Me in the Bathroom. Rebirth and Rock and Roll in New York City, 2001-2011 about the rise (and, in some cases, fall) of all those The bands, groups like the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and of course the DFA crew. Oral histories such as these are always entertaining, but this one clearly needed some editing, and it is a little jarring that some people from that scene didn’t give interviews for it but are being discussed at length. There was apparently a guy in Interpol who took a lot of drugs and had a lot of sex, which … Thank you for this information, presented without comment from him. Strange stuff, but having read Where Are Your Boys Tonight? The Oral History of Emo’s Mainstream Explosion, 1999-2008 a few months earlier, it made for an interesting contrast between, uh, mostly white middle class people from the US-American city and mostly white middle class people from the US-American suburbs and what they were doing with their lives and in music before, around and after 9/11. That being said, it is interesting to see that musical phenomena that shaped my youth and early twenties, or at least provided a sort of pop cultural background noise, be swallowed up and regurgitated by the nostalgia industrial complex. How will that play out in ten, twenty years from now with regard to hyperpop, etc.? An interesting piece on how we document the present was Kieran Press-Reynolds’ Pitchfork feature on the Wikipedia editors trying to do just that, which apparently created a niche scandal that D. F. Lovett summarised neatly in his Edit History newsletter. Besides that, I have watched a few good movies recently, including Rose and Universal Language, but only wrote about one that left me very conflicted: Over at Letterboxd, I try to explain in an English-language review why I hated I Swear, a movie that I thought was thoroughly enjoyable. Lastly, I am looking forward to a joint performance by Macie Stewart, Lia Kohl, and Whitney Johnson alongside The Dwarfs of East Agouza at this season’s first Kiezsalon evening at Potsdam’s Das MINSK on Thursday. I’ve also done some translation work for both the AI: Ancestral Immediacies and Tirailleurs. Trials and Tribulations exhibitions/programmes at Haus der Kulturen der Welt, the latter of which ends with a lovely finissage between the 12th and the 14th of June that puts a special focus on sound and music. See you there!

Thank you for your attention and until next time.