Welcome to the 19th edition of my mail-outs, all of which have been archived on my website.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 below. Again I specifically point it out if a piece is available in an official or my own English translation.
This will be a quick(ish) one before a longer break—I’ll be moving houses in about two weeks. You can still contribute to making things easier or at least lighter for me by buying some of my records.
+++++ Stuff That I Published
— Speaking of which, HHV-Mag has published its annual list with its top 50 vinyl records of the first half of 2026 (German/English version seems to be not accessible, unfortunately), including some introductory words and reviews by yours truly. I am involved in the final selection (we had a stunning 200+ items on our longlist thanks to our amazing writers) and have a clear bias here, but I do think we managed once more to find and feature some of the most interesting music (caveat: that was released on vinyl) out there. For the same magazine, I have reviewed two reissues—Celer’s Capri (English/German) and Siavash Amini’s Till Human Voices Wake Us (English/German)—as well as the new Horse Lords album, Demand to Be Taken to Heaven Alive! (English/German).
— I’ve also written the blurb for composer John McCowen as well as performers Lucy Railton and Weston Olencki’s wonderful album Pressure Chords, a fantastic record of increasingly urgent minimalism that is being released by Hallow Ground, and I have also dug up a bunch of new(-ish) records for the new instalment of my Found Sounds column (English/German) for field notes, writing about new solo and collaborative records by Andrea Taeggi, Beam Splitter, the EROSÃO PERCUSSION TRIO, and many more.
— In that last text, I talk about one event that featured an alumnus of the inclusive workshop programme IckMachWelle (yes, banging on about them once more here). For der Freitag (archived), I wrote about their latest fundraising party at ://about:blank. They still have a GoFundMe campaign going on, by the way. I have also reviewed their latest Superbrains Vol. 2 compilation for taz, but the text hasn’t been published for some reason.
— This would not have happened to me if a) I were a music artist with b) access to my Spotify For Artists profile and c) video content to share. You see, Spotify has rolled out the beta phase for self-uploaded video content (music vids, but also BTS/ITS or live footage welcome!) and is essentially turning a bit more into YouTube while YouTube slash YouTube Music is trying to turn a bit more into Spotify. This is all hilarious, and over at WDR 5’s Töne, Texte, Bilder, I explained the background and strategic goals behind all this. The gist of it is, of course, that Spotify wants to create a bigger lock-in effect slash make more money, d’uh. But I am wondering whether or not listeners actually want to be bombarded with even more audio-visual content on a platform to which they have signed up some decade plus ago for … you know … music.
— Speaking about music, or rather not speaking about music: When my WDR Westart (not archived, unfortunately) editor called me to get on air to discuss Sony’s decision to discontinue the production of CDs starting in January 2028 (meaning that the PlayStation 6 will come without a CD drive), I happily used the opportunity to talk about Chokepoint Capitalism a bit, a book that I whole-heartedly recommend: Sony is effectively creating a tighter bottleneck for both gaming devs and the audience, while it also raises the question how we will be able to document and archive the developments in this cultural sector in the future. I am also mentioning this here to give a shout-out to my colleague Florian Zandt, who unlike me knows his way around the gaming industry and hopped on a call with me to answer my dumb questions.
— Speaking of dumb questions, »how is this not illegal!?« is one that we have heard very often in the context of AI-generated deepfakes in recent months. In a brief radio feature for DLF Kultur’s Studio 9, I—alongside singer/songwriter Tara Nome Doyle and legal scholar Alma Eggers—tried to explain how a lot of indie musicians these days are confronted with their own AI clones and what they can do to fight back in different jurisdictions; whether that’s trying to slap a trademark on your voice like my good personal friend Taylor S., Denmark’s new law that slaps a copyright on your voice, or … well, the tricky situation in Germany.
— Having talked with Doyle about how it felt to find out that your music has most definitely been used for AI training purpose thanks to that new The Atlantic database whose publication led to SZA lashing out at Diplo—something that I discussed with my colleague Caren Miesenberger in DLF Kultur Kompressor’s weekly podcast even though I was originally invited on the show to talk about how the media illustrated an absolutely historical heatwave here in Europe—it seemed like a strange twist of fate to a few days get a call from a Deutschlandradio Corso editor asking if I wanted to discuss the Suno hack. You see, someone took a peek into their source code and provided 404Media with screenshots that make it crystal clear that Suno scraped data from Genius, YouTube Music, and—ironically, considering the platform’s ostensible anti-AI stance—Deezer. This will be very helpful to everyone who is currently suing Suno—i.e., almost all of the music world—and gives Deezer the opportunity to do the funniest thing ever.
— Speaking of things that are funny and maybe fun: I was a guest at DLF Kultur’s Breitband programme today to talk about nebenan.de, the social platform for all your neighbourhood needs and visions of a sharing economy. I discussed it with Marcus Richter, who also talked about a new digital archiving scheme (no, this is not related to the PlayStation), and Vera Linß, who interviewed an expert about the UN’s stance on the potential dangers of AI. Modelled after US-American Nextdoor, nebenan.de has been quietly growing in Germany (that’s at least according to the company itself) and follows an interesting approach that is heavily localised, relies on real names as display ones, and a verification process that is not at all perfect but creates a bit more trust than any other platform currently gives you in the Slop Era.
— Speaking of things that go down in the neighbourhood (or, well, at least the same town), a new iteration of Haus der Kulturen der Welt’s Bwa Kayiman festival will take place on the 1st and 2nd of August. I won’t be able to attend because I have to carry a lot of records and furniture around, but based on the event descriptions that I translated this should be fun and interesting if you have the time! The same is true with regard to the next edition of Jazzfest Berlin, whose programme—also translated by yours truly—has already been announced and seems like one of those not-to-be-missed events.
+++++ Some Unsorted Recommendations
Tuner could just as well be called Baby Good Will Uncutting Whiplash. Both narratively, visually, and musically/sonically, Daniel Roher’s social slash romantic slash violent crime drama about a piano tuner who suffers from hyperacousis (bad noises = ouch!), is really good at opening safes (click sounds = ka-ching!) and does crime only to financially help out his aging mentor and buy expensive gifts for his musically talented girlfriend (awwww, right!?) is utterly predictable and incredibly fun, wholesome, and thrilling when it needs to be. A tight script, wonderful performances plus a clear-cut distinct visual and sonic identity that is never over-emphasised make this the kind of movie that I really needed to watch after two incredibly stressful days. Experiments in Musique Concrète by Nippon Cultural Broadcasting (= Bunka Hōsō), the newest release in Edition Omega Point’s wonderful Obscure Tape Music of Japan series, doesn’t quite allow you to switch off your brain for its run-time. Featuring two compositions/recordings by Hara Yoshiro and Matsudaira Yoritsune, it has finally made some of the earliest musique concrète experiments from the country available. It pairs well with Yuasa Jōji’s 葵の上 = Aoi No Ue, released in the same series—a vocal retelling of the Genji Monogatari in a Gesang der Jünglinge style. Speaking of which, Stine Janvin is known as a vocal artist whose work is usually far-out. Take In Labour, which features some of the most extreme vocal performances this side of Junko, which is really saying something and obviously means that I love it and have included a piece in a mix way back when, which prompted my favourite SoundCloud comment of all time: »Wow! This is so annoying and pleasant.« Anyhow, on her new record with Morten Joh, Or Gare – funeral procession music from Ryfylke, Norway Janvin continues to keep it weird, but also works with popular forms—the end results are marvelous, really.
Thank you for your attention and until next time.