Welcome to the eleventh edition of my mail-outs, all of which have been archived on my website.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

+++++ Stuff That I Wrote (or Said on the Radio)

— With its twelfth instalment, my series of club portraits for DJ LAB is unfortunately coming to an end. I am grateful that my editor Marius Pritzl supported me in shedding a light on a few stationary institutions in a scene that has been focusing  more on free-floating collectives in recent years, trying to make the audience understand who runs these clubs and how, what challenges they face and how they deal with the plethora of crises clubs are facing today. With more and more clubs closing all around Germany—one featured club closed literally days after the piece’s publication, two that I wanted to include followed shortly after I sent them my interview request—this felt like important work. In a little over a year, I have profiled objekt klein a in Dresden, Gewölbe in Cologne, Muna in Bad Klosterlausnitz, Elipamanoke in Leipzig, Waldschänke Dornheim in Würzburg, Weltspiele in Hannover (RIP), Tresor.West in Dortmund, Geheimclub in Magdeburg, Romantica in Stuttgart, villaWuller in Trier, City Club in Augsburg, and—last but definitely not least—Amp in Münster. 

— If you aren’t from a German-speaking country, or simply do not care about hip-hop, you have probably never heard about Spotify’s Modus Mio. But with roughly two million followers, mentions in literally hundreds of rap songs, several live event spin-offs and a whole podcast dedicated to it, the German-language equivalent to Rap Caviar—i.e., an editorial playlist for so-called Deutschrap—was representative on Spotify’s role as a cultural gatekeeper for certain subcultures. And now, poof, it’s gone. In der Freitag (archived), I speculated about how this fits into the DSP’s current cost-saving and ARPU-increasing efforts and how it necessitates artists and labels to make use of Discovery Mode more often. That piece was written before Spotify announced that a sort of similar playlist called OFFCULT (lol/cringe) would be launched in Germany, which changed little about what I thought of the whole thing, as I’ve said in a discussion with Jan Kawelke at WDR’s Cosmo that unfortunately wasn’t archived. Now I’m wondering if Spotify will slowly do the same in the English-language markets.

— Speaking of Spotify, the company has finally reacted to all the very bad press about the slopification of its platform, removing 75 million »spammy tracks.« Not all of this is AI, and it’s not even clear what they fucking mean when they talk about »spam.« Also, their proposed measures to battle said spam are lukewarm at best, as I said in a discussion with Martin Böttcher for DLF Kultur’s Tonart that for some reason also wasn’t archived. My conclusion was that Spotify doesn’t want to go all in when it comes to combating AI slop because its soon-to-be-CEOs Gustav Söderström and Alex Norström (love having to memorise the two most generic Swedish names of all times!) want to boost the platform through AI so being too harsh on slop would send mixed signals to the stock market. Incredibly, a few hours later Spotify announced a nonsensical ChatGPT integration and a few days later that it was working on genAI products with the blessing of the Big Three, the Merlin Network and Believe, owner of TuneCore. I had little choice but to talk this through with Oliver Schwesig, again at DLF Kultur’s Tonart, but since Universal announced not one, but two different deals with AI companies on that very day, we had to go even more in-depth. 

— You can probably guess that by now I am very, very tired of talking about Spotify all the time. Indeed, I was over the moon when I made my DLF Kultur Breitband début this month to talk about the biggest music streaming platform in the world: YouTube. In my discussion with Vera Linß and Marcus Richter, I took the company’s recent report about having paid north of eight billion US-dollars to the music industry between last and this summer (Spotify reported a round 10 billion for 2024) as a starting point to discuss YouTube’s economic, legal, and cultural impact on the music world and virtually all of the social internet. Which meant that I had to talk about Content ID, the »Harlem Shake,« and peak boomer-core Music YouTuber Rick Beato. 

— »Just buy records instead« is something some people very helpfully say whenever unfair remuneration in streaming is being discussed, but that business is also not going all too well. Berlin’s second pressing plant Objects Manufacturing has filed for bankruptcy. For a brief DJ LAB piece, I spoke with one of the CEOs about the why, the how, and the what next. If analogue is not your thing but you are a) a successful DJ or b) an up and coming producer, you might want to check out Exibeat. Also for DJ LAB, I spoke with co-founder and CEO Boris Parasochka about the idea behind this platform that aims to both a) serve as a centralised platform for DJs on which to receive their promos, and b) make it possible for producers to sell those tracks instead of sending them out for free. Is this a sort of specialised Bandcamp? Kinda. But Parasochka prefers to compare his platform with Aslice instead.

— Two or three mail-outs again I was gushing about Monk in Pieces, the new documentary on, well, Meredith Monk. Since then she has released a new album called Cellular Songs via ECM, was awarded a Golden Lion in Venezia, and started as a Pina Bausch guest lecturer at Essen’s Folkwang Universität der Künste this October (like, literally all of that in one month). The folks at WDR’s Westart let me produce a lil’ radio feature on this woman’s work because I am now the world’s foremost expert on all things Monk, obvi. 

— If you think that Monk seems like a thoroughly unreal artist, I’d like to introduce you to Xania Monet—an »artist« whose music and videos are completely AI-generated and whose creator (prompter?) has reportedly signed a multi-million dollar record deal. In der Freitag (archived), I argue that Monet’s successes are built on sand in several respects: Firstly, it isn’t all that clear legally if the creator and label can rightfully claim all those royalties, secondly I’m doubtful if Monet’s impressive streaming numbers and even her social media numbers are a result of people really caring about her or if this just a Velvet Sundown-esque shadow virality sort of thing, because thirdly, I don’t think that the audience at large really wants artificial artists because there is little evidence so far that they can build up parasocial relationships with some AI-generated slop.

— Speaking of uneven relationships: Do we really understand animals, are they our friends indeed? For the Germany-wide release of the year’s most hyped horror movie, Good Boy, I talked with Max Oppel over at DLF Kultur’s Kompressor about how the makers managed to tell a haunted house story from the perspective of a dog, and wherein the true horror of all this lies for me.

— I’ve also reviewed some rekerds, among them Kuntari’s Mutu Beton (English/German) and Florian TM Zeisig’s A New Life (English/German) for HHV-Mag as well as Marta Forsberg’s Archeology of Intimacy, Guedra Guedra’s Mutant, and Sanam’s Sametou Sawtan for Musikexpress. And a bunch of albums for which I had written the press releases have been announced. My personal highlight might be the Keplar reissue of 28 by Tujiko Noriko and AOKI takamasa. Hallow Ground has released new albums by CoH & Wladimir Schall and Matthias Puech, and Ni Vu Ni Connu has finally put out Aerodynamics, the wonderful debut (sort of) solo album by Kai Fagaschinski. There’s more on the way.

— Something that I also worked on but which got significantly delayed—we’re talking half a decade—is a book with illustrator Alex Solman’s portraits of deceased public figures. I haven’t received a copy yet, however it seems like the foreword I had written for it way back when has not been included, which only makes sense because … Have I mentioned that I wrote it half a decade ago? The book even had a different working title back then. It is now called Staying Alive. Unsterbliche Idole unserer Zeit and comes with a foreword by Sarah Lorenz as well as short blurbs by Gereon Klug, as far as I can tell. I’m very much looking forward to getting my copy. I love Alex’s work and I think most of you might be familiar with it, too—he did the FACT podcast and continues to design posters for both Golden Pudel in Hamburg and Paloma Bar in Berlin.

+++++ Some Unsorted Recommendations

Speaking of clubs, I have become very bored with most dance music and feel alienated from the quote-unquote scene, but once in a while some records catch my attention. I absolutely love to see Polygonia flourish, and her label QEONE churns out amazing releases on an almost monthly basis. Deep, intricate stuff that reeks of patchouli here or there but makes up for that with some incredibly nuanced sound design. Emily Jeanne makes music reminiscent of this approach, and she has just released her second EP on her own quỳnh label. Past Through Desire is much darker in tone and also slower than her first on the imprint, but it is just as great. And let’s not forget that Viola Klein still puts out records. New Chapter for the trusted Meakusma is an even more collaborative record than her previous ones, featuring remixes by Whodat, Kassem Mosse, and Nídia as well as two collaborative tracks with the mbalax Sabar Ensemble Diop that simply credit Klein as »808.« If you like the Ndagga Rhythm Force but find it weird that their work has someone else’s name written all over it, here’s how you can deal with that instead. And while not strictly a danceable record, I have become somewhat obsessed with Kobermann’s Unterland album and would like to thank mailing list member S. Nicolussi for reminding me of it. When I in turn recommended it to a friend, I described it as »think Monolake covering Kreidler tunes, but you accidentally play the record on 33 ⅓ instead of 45.« Kobermann runs A.T.C. Records, whose extensive Umwelt Vol. 1 compilation chock-full of anarchic field recordings is also very much worth checking out. One tape release that knocked me over immediately was John Kolodij’s First Fire • At Dawn on Astral Editions. I must have overlooked it when it came out in 2020, but I bought it on a whim recently because the great Sarah Hennies is on percussion here. The first side is especially beautiful: anthemic and rich dronescapes punctuated by very subtle rhythms—the perfect soundtrack for an extended autumn evening walk. There’s lots of nice banjo noodling on the flip. Their previous sort-of label mates أحمد [Ahmed] have returned with سماع [Sama’a] (Audition) on Café Oto’s Otoroku and it is of course the best jazz/improv album you’ll hear all year if you’re not counting that new The Necks record. On the nosier side, the new Incapacitants CD chwalfa, recorded live on two evenings at Café Oto, slaps even harder than recent releases like the excellent Achilles Tendon Rupture. I can’t really tell, but it seems like they might use auto-tune now!? Anyhow, two new essential Merzbow reissues also arrived on my doorstep: Aka Meme was originally released in 1983 and thus when the project was still a duo. It is a record clearly in dialogue with the industrial music of that time and shamelessly indulges in exoticist sampling of overtone singing, etc., which, well … At least it’s no Graceland. Meanwhile, Urashima finally reissued an album that was one of my initial door openers to the world of Masami Akita, 2003’s Animal Magnetism. Here’s what a now-deleted Discogs user had to say about it: »One of Merzbow’s best guitar noise albums. […] The noise is not to heavy or ear busting, like his older stuff, but instead it’s very rhythmic sensual. My wife falls asleep to this type of noise sometimes. […] A great release, if you can ignore the chicken samples.« Personally, I think the chicken samples are worthy of your attention. Speaking of sampling things, collecting one man’s trash and making it your treasure: I have finally, finally watched Agnès Varda’s Les Glaneurs et la Glaneuse. It is one of the most beautiful, soul-crushing, interesting, funny, casual-yet-deep documentaries I have ever seen, and left me deeply moved. If you want to know more about the GDR’s most famous punk band, Schleimkeim, and its leader Otze, a recent documentary about their/his story is currently available on YouTube for free and I thought it was pretty well done.

Thank you for your attention and until next time.