Welcome to the 15th edition of my mail-outs, all of which have been archived here. I’ve been gone for a while, then I was idle for a while, then nobody commissioned me for a while, so … This one took a while. Sorry, I guess!?
Anyhow, 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 Wrote (or Said on the Radio)
— Of course I had to write about AI slop again. In my first piece for the German taz in 14 (!) years, I took the recent shady Morgan Stanley survey about AI music consumption as well as the possibly artificial successes of Sienna Rose and Jacub as an opportunity to ask: If it is true that people listen to increasingly more AI music, where and how do they do it, and is there anything that tells us that they want to and/or enjoy it? If you are a ByteFM subscriber, I explained to Klaus Water for his taz mixtape why the same questions need to be asked about Aphex Twin’s recent YouTube successes. Personally, I think that the above-average performance of certain slop is a) heavily platform-dependent, i.e. it performs well in algorithmic environments such as Slopify and/or video-first platforms such as TikTok and YouTube, also because b) a lot of this music is being used and consumed in memetic ways; the most striking recent example for this being the sloppy »Papaoutai« cover that Dubai-based influencers were apparently legally obliged to push in their Instagram shorts while bombs were raining down on them because the 21st century is the most boring dystopia.
— Speaking about numbers that do not tell you the whole story quite yet, Adam Neely has made a great video about Suno which came with its own impromptu survey: According to the replies he received by some of the slopform’s users, barely anyone who generates slop there ever listens to other people’s slop generated there. Go figure. Plus, it should be noted that this company, valued at almost $ 2.5 billion, has a meagre two million subscribers according to CEO Mikey Shulman (has he ever been seen in a room together with Nathan Fielder, btw?) and that it generated a total of 300 million USD in yearly revenue last year. We do not know about Suno’s operating costs, but I doubt that they are smaller than this. Not a great ROI, if you ask me, and does not bode well for the future of the company—also because Suno is getting its arse sued big time by GEMA. For DLF Kultur’s Tonart, I produced a brief radio feature that took that lawsuit as a starting point to summarise the many, many grievances people in the music world have with Suno. Fun fact, when I reached out to Suno for comment, I received an AI-generated response, and then was left on read because, again, the 21st century is the most boring dystopia.
— Speaking still about Suno, something that Tim Ingham pointed out over at Music Business Worldwide was that Suno’s revenue mostly comes from Premier subscriptions, i.e. the tier that »that lets someone make 2,000 songs a month, or roughly 66 per day.« Ingham rhetorically asks, »What might appeal to Suno’s users about this industrial scale of production?« Which brings me to the ever more pressing issue of identity theft, or more accurately, what I call the AI cuckoo’s egg scheme that utilises a gaping loophole to upload AI-generated slop to real artists’ DSP profiles through digital distributors who look the other way in order to make a quick buck. I discussed this over at NDR Kultur’s Das Journal, but the talk was not archived. However, I wrote the whole thing down for NDR Kultur’s website and explained why this scheme is a near-perfect crime. Two more pieces around this issue are forthcoming.
— One of my points regarding the slopification of streaming services is that it is mostly the big ones—especially Spotify—where that stuff goes shadow-viral rather than being actively listened to. That is all the more reason to pay attention to the smaller streaming platforms that are curation-first, context-rich(er), and mostly slop-free. For der Freitag (archived), I wrote about Cantilever, Qobuz, and Rokk, and in conversation with Vivan Perkovic over at DLF Kultur’s Tonart discussed the »music magazine you can listen to,« Cantilever, in more detail.
— As we all perfectly know, there are other ways of making some money with music, and vinyl is the one physical medium whose revival has been talked about for … well, it is almost 20 years now, is it? For my last piece for DJ LAB, or rather my first piece for Loop Rituals, since that is this magazine’s name now, which also happens to be my last piece for Loop Rituals, I looked into some of the dubious numbers that support this narrative and spoke to some folks whose job allows them to get a clearer idea of the truth about the quote-unquote vinyl boom. Naturally, things are more complicated than they seem.
— Someone who is a verified vinyl fiend is Dominik André, whom I first got to know when he interned at Groove magazine during my stint as an editor there. A few years back, he started the label Subject To Restrictions Discs, whose entire catalogue I can wholeheartedly recommend. I have profiled Dominik and his endeavours over at HHV-Mag (English/German).
— For the same magazine, I reviewed Geinoh Yamashirogumi’s pre-Akira masterpiece 輪廻交響楽 = Ecophony Rinne (English/German), Magda Drozd’s Divided By Dusk (English/German), Roudi Vagou & Läuten Der Seele’s Taghelle Nacht (English/German), Daniel O’Sullivan & Richard Youngs’s Persian Carpets (English/German), Atobe Shinichi’s Silent Way (English/German), and Noémi Büchi’s Exuvie (English/German). A Musikexpress review of mine that was published online was dedicated to Silvia Tarozzi’s Lucciole, a clear favourite this year. And in my Found Sounds column in field notes, I wrote about connecting with and through music, talking about new records by Ben Glas, Period Music, Christina Kubisch, Magda Mayas, gamut inc, and a few more (English/German).
— Also, I was chuffed when Hainbach and Ah! Kosmos approached me to write the press release for their second duo album, Gentle Hum. That was one of four duo albums for which I wrote the blurb that were announced in recent weeks, the other three being Emilio Gordoa & Sven-Åke Johansson’s Die Dritte Ebene for Ni Vu Ni Connu, Alan (Abrahams a.k.a. Portable/Bodycode) & Jan (Jelinek a.k.a. Farben, etc.)’s Take me, I’m yours on the latter’s faitiche, and Lawrence English / Werner Dafeldecker’s Fathom Tides for Hallow Ground. They are all very good!
+++++ Some Unsorted Recommendations
When C. told me about an artist who calls herself Skate Bush, my interest was piqued. Her self-titled debut album is available for free download on Bandcamp, but I also bought a copy during my latest anost haul. If you like Grouper, Carla dal Forno, YL Hooi or loved those recent blurry singer/songwriter albums on AD 93, you might enjoy this one, too. anost also had Zushi Naoki’s IV on sale, and I’m glad they did—I knew vaguely of this guy as one of the founding members of the great Hijokaidan, but had no idea he was also making fantastic … ambient psych rock, you might say? Won’t be the last record of his I purchase, that is for sure. And while I was buying those, I pre-ordered Alex Zhang Hungtai’s forthcoming Dras on Shelter Press, and—since I didn’t have that one yet—also purchased Young Gods Run Free, originally self-released and then later pressed on wax by Modern Love. The former is more drone-y, while the latter features two long-form compositions that sound like broken gamelan. Speaking of which, I got to know Nist-Nah Ensemble member Charles Dubois’ solo workthanks to Econore putting out his wonderful Seize frictions album last year. I have since discovered that I not only love his percussion-as-sound-art approach as a solo artist in the vein of maybe Jon Mueller or Will Guthrie at his most textural, but also enjoy duo projects such as the one with François Dufeil, Cloches sous pression, or the Musique de répondeur (»Answering Machine Music«) project, a compilation of phoned-in, anonymous contributions ranging from lo-fi sound poetry to harsh noise wall, from pop music to jazz ditties, from what sounds like a Georgian choir accompanied by a beatboxer to mangled gore-noise. And, of course, hold music. Anything you can imagine, basically. I love low-barrier, community-oriented projects such as this one. After all, 30 minutes on earth by Zhu Wenbo is one of my favourite albums of the decade so far. I also love death metal and finally read Swedish Death Metal by Daniel Ekeroth, which despite its fanzine-esque writing provides a solid account of how things came together this side of Tampa. Naturally, I was blasting a lot of old-school death metal from Sweden and elsewhere, my favourite discovery being Immortalis, a German band that released only one album in 1991. Indicium De Mortuis, reissued in 2024, seriously slaps—this was death metal unafraid of being a lil’ symphonic/dramatic while having learnt all the right lessons from Kreator. A more recent and decidedly more American death metal record I’ve recently enjoyed was Wharflurch’s Shittier/Slimier compilation—an incredible collection of demos that are more versatile and varied than most other bands’ discographies. Neat. Besides that, the new Silvia Tarozzi album, Lucciole, was on heavy rotation, I love Death Is Not the End and Maqom’s Digging Central Asia: Musical Archaeology along the Silk Road, and for obvious reasons I was blasting some Googoosh, whose autobiography A Sinful Voice has just come out. I haven’t read it yet because I was busy with Black Wave. Saudi Arabia, Iran, and the Forty-Year Rivalry That Unraveled Culture, Religion, and Collective Memory in the Middle EastbyKim Ghattas, one of the books that I bought in order to gain a deeper understanding of the complex geopolitics of a region that has been on the news a lot lately. The title is somewhat misleading because Ghattas takes three seemingly separate historical events—the invasion of Afghanistan, the Grand Mosque seizure in Mecca, and of course the regime change in Iran—as a starting point for a labyrinthic narrative about how they shifted the political landscapes not only in Saudi Arabia and Iran, but also Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, Pakistan and a few other SWANA countries. If that sounds like a lot, it definitely is: Ghattas tries to tell the stories of wide-ranging religious, ideological, social, and political shifts from the perspective of a broad range of different protagonists. And while she is an obviously competent writer, this was probably not the best idea—at times, I found Black Wave convoluted and seriously confusing because it keeps jumping from person to person, region to region, back and forth in time. However, I still find it very important and would recommend it as a starting point if you feel like you need an intro to the past 50 years in that region. I can personally say that I have learnt a lot on these 330+ pages. If you prefer some more light-hearted entertainment these days (I won’t blame you), I’d like to recommend two movies for vastly different reasons: Project Hail Mary is probably the most-hyped movie of 2026 so far (sorry, Melania). I don’t necessarily understand what exactly people like so much about it—it’s just Spaceman with more references to other movies thrown in—but as someone who is … not a fan, but very interested in the recently-unavoidable people-alone-in-space genre whose central elements this movie so faithfully replicates, I can say that it is well done, entertaining for most of its runtime, and really feels like a blockbuster. If you prefer your takes on established tropes to be somewhat fresher, please check out DJ Ahmet, a coming-of-age dramedy that takes place in North Macedonia and doesn’t pretend to be something that it is not while offering a lot of depth and a few very hard laughs. Speaking of which, Kristoffer Borgli’s The Drama was the most invigorating and yes, funniest movie I’ve seen since Anora. I liked Borgli’s Sick of Myself, but it found it a bit derivative because it borrowed so heavily from Joachim Trier, and didn’t really warm up to Dream Scenario because it felt too American to me, but here Borgli really excels as both a writer and director, having found both something to say about the fine line between fantasy and reality in interpersonal relationships, and a visual language to match. Do yourself a favour and watch it in a—hopefully packed—cinema. It makes for a fantastic communal experience. And those are sorely needed, aren’t they?
Thank you for your attention and until next time.