Welcome to the 21st edition of my mail-outs, all of which have been archived here.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.

I’ve been on vacation, and then I have been on the opposite of a vacation for the past few weeks, so this mail-out might be a bit longer than the other ones. Sorry! 

+++++ Stuff That I Published

— The year 2001 is often referred to as the last great year in music, either speaking in economic terms or strictly musical ones. Indeed, it gave us some of the most legendary albums of the century so far. Still, it never felt like a cohesive cultural moment to me. For the 25th anniversary of 9/11, I interrogated this apparent contradiction in a lengthy piece for HHV-Mag (English/German) and a far shorter radio feature for DLF Kultur’s Tonart. 

— When researching this piece, I realised that also the iPod would celebrate its 25th birthday this year, so I produced two different radio features—another one for DLF Kultur’s Tonart and one for WDR 5’s Töne, Texte, Bilder—that took its current alleged comeback among the Gen Z as a starting point to ask how its function and meaning have shifted in the context in which we currently find ourselves. I find it interesting that the former symbol of digital overabundance and interconnectedness is now being used by some people to concentrate and go off the grid.

— Speaking still about anniversaries, October 3rd marked the 36th anniversary of the reunification of Germany, which provided Berlin’s ClubCommission with an opportunity to stage an exhibition next door from Tresor’s downstairs dancefloor. As I explained in both DLF Kultur’s Tonart and over at radio3, I did enjoy Tanzflächen der Wiedervereinigung (Dancefloors of Reunification)—which you can still visit until the equally historical November 9th for free if you book a time slot in advance—not only because it isn’t just about techno, but for also providing a counterpoint to the tired origin myth of Berlin’s club culture as the one thing driven by peace, love, unity, respect (or as Motte called it: Friede, Freude, Eierkuchen) that opened up the common ground in which a formerly divided country came together. 

— Speaking of people coming together for the love of the music, for taz I wrote about festivals during a time of climate emergency, taking a recent wildfire near Eupen, i.e. close to East Belgium’s finest music festival Meakusma, as a starting point to ask what impact extreme weather conditions have on festivals, and their role and responsibilities in a situation such as this. Besides turning this into a brief radio piece for Klaus Walter’s ByteFM taz.mixtape as well, I also indirectly picked up on this thread when I spoke about the world’s most famous metal festival, the now Superstruct and thus KKR-owned Wacken:Open:Air, very symbolically licensing its name to a Japanese festival at WDR’ Cosmo (not archived). As I point out in my taz article, there is something deeply cynical about Wacken having become a muddy metaphor for music festivals in an ecological crisis last year when the company that owns the company that owns it also has a lot of stakes in the fossil fuel industry.

— Speaking of fossils, Black Sabbath took the stage one final time last Summer in their native Birmingham, and of course the whole thing was turned into a concert movie because how else would Sharon Osbourne be able to profit from the last-ever public appearance of her husband shortly before his death? Regardless of the intentions behind it—all proceeds of the festival itself reportedly went to charity—I did love Ozzy & Black Sabbath: Back to the Beginning, as I explained over at DLF Kultur’s Tonart: If you ignore the abysmal performances of some of the bands that came to play an Ozzy/Sabbath cover alongside original material—Pantera and Guns’n’Roses obviously being especially terrible—and focus on the good stuff—Yungblud’s incredible cover of »Changes,« seeing Ozzy at 76 with late-stage Parkinson jump around in his throne out of sheer excitement—it is quite beautiful and feels like a dignified way to bow out after changing music forever. So let’s see if Sharon and son Jack will really go ahead with that AI hologram of Ozzy’s, or if millions of fans telling them to bugger off has made them come to their senses.

— Speaking of which, deepfakes and soundalikes remain a huge problem for the wider music world. Fairly recently, it was announced that Sony Music Entertainment—the world’s second-largest music company—had asked to remove more than 260.000 different deepfakes from various streaming platforms in recent times. For taz, I once more took the case of Tara Nome Doyle as an example of how scammers siphon off royalties from smaller artists, and the complicated and not always accommodating legal situation around deepfakes. The fact that Spotify has now started to label »AI personas« (but not AI music) will not be of much help for musicians like Doyle, as I explained over at DLF Kultur’s Tonart and WDR 3 and 5’s Westart (not archived). 

— If you prefer your music to be real, I suggest digging into the back catalogue of New York label New Amsterdam, which has a pretty unique organisational/business model and has been putting out tonnes of great stuff in recent years. I profiled it for HHV-Mag (English/German) and can especially recommend Dorian Wood’s haunting Canto de Todes and Francesca Gaza & Kugelförmigkeit Ensemble’s sprawling Crown Shyness from this year.

— Unfortunately, my column for field notes was discontinued, but I continue to review albums for HHV-Mag and Musikexpress. For the former, I wrote about new albums by Julia Holter (English/German) and Sarah Davachi (English/German) as well as a reissue of some iconic Adolf Noise a.k.a. DJ Koze material (English/German), and for the latter about new releases by CULK, Klara Lewis, Grouper’s band Helen, and the farewell collaborative album by Sakamoto Ryūichi and alva noto.

— I also wrote the blurbs for Elischa Heller’s Hallow Ground debut album Breathing Soil and a reissue of Andreas Tilliander’s classic Ljud on Keplar, respectively.  

— It is exhibition season and I recommend visiting Haus der Kulturen der Welt, which looks especially pretty in Fall and has a lot to offer as well, including Not All Travellers Walk Roads, for which I have done some translation work. If you happen to be in Vienna, please go to Wien Modern for me! I have moderated a round table discussion between Annea Lockwood, Kirsten Reese, and Liza Lim for the programme book and really wanted to go, but as of now it seems unlikely that I will manage to do so. 

— Lastly, I also made … Not music, but two sound collages (!?) that were inspired by vaporwave methodologies (i.e., sampling + slowing stuff doing considerably and looping it). Thematically, they deal with two monuments—one dedicated to Ernst Thälmann, the other to Anton Saefkow—in my former neighbourhood in Prenzlauer Berg. They were released as part of a split with my homie von jeglichem wort and are meant to pay homage to his on-going interrogation of (proto-)fascist/fascist-adjacent language in both poetry and sound. Does that sound like a fun time or what!? 

+++++ Some Unsorted Recommendations

Speaking of which, during our beach vacation I read the recently-released Googoosh autobiography, but can also recommend the short chapter on her that N. (a.k.a. Nikta Vahid-Moghtada) wrote for the German-language These Girls Forever! anthology, edited by Juliane Streich and published by Ventil. An abridged version of her piece as well as a few others, all read by the authors including N., have been featured in an episode of Diviam Hoffmann’s Ex & Pop over at WDR 5. Somewhat relatedly, Russian newspaper Novaya Gazeta will cease to exist next weekend after 30 years of operations, most of which it spent as a corrective to an increasingly authoritarian government under literally life-threatening conditions. Julia Loktev’s documentary series My Undesirable Friends follows the lives of some of the people who worked for it and their colleagues from the now-exiled TV Rain channel. We had started watching it a day or so after a landslide election win in Saxony-Anhalt by the far-right AfD, whose candidate has very explicitly stated that he wants to abolish the public broadcaster, so it made for an eerie but important watch. It is very, very long and full of incredibly banal everyday scenes and that might not appeal to everyone, but I appreciated Loktev’s near-obsessive documentation of literally everything these people do because it paints a very holistic picture of the wide-reaching oppression they face and the significance of every small gesture of resistance. The Fall is also a lot, but in a different sense. Tarsem Singh’s 2006 adaptation of the 1981 Bulgarian movie Yo Ho Ho (which I now desperately want to watch as well) felt like a wonderful antidote to both Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma and Digger, two recent movies that much like The Fall deal with storytelling and the fragile, complicated relationship between fiction and fact, and do it … very fucking badly. The Fall doesn’t only offer one of the most impressive and colourful experiences of filmmaking since The Colour of Pomegranades, it also has a more nuanced take to offer on the power of a good story and how it might be abused. If you find The NeverEnding Story a tad too wholesome, try this one. Speaking of wholesome, that is also what Linda Linda Linda is, on the surface at least: This 2005 movie by Yamashita Nobuhiro follows four schoolgirls rehearsing some songs they want to perform at a school event. That is pretty much the whole story, which essentially revolves around the usual coming-of-age and friendship tropes, but does it in a charming way that never feels forced. I couldn’t help but think that the fact that one of the girls is a South Korean exchange student gives this movie an implicit political dimension, too. Speaking of music, I have been mostly listening to death metal for professional reasons in the past few weeks. Highlights included rediscovering Timeghoul and Lykathea Aflame as the ones who paved the way for the recent cosmic death metal movement (if you enjoy Blood Incantation, give them a spin) as well as the last Drawn and Quartered album (if you like your death metal more old-school) and of course Altarage’s Cogwheel (proggy dissodeath with some ambient excursions). Apart from that, during our beach vacation I fell in love once more with the terribly-named and chronically-underrated Rainer Maria. I still haven’t cracked up my copy of Andrew Sacher’s Emo Revival book, but I’ll be damned if all those bands do not cite this group as their main inspiration—somewhere between Cap’n Jazz-y anarchy, American Football-esque intricacy, Mineral-like melancholy, and The Promise Ring-ish literacy in regard to their lyrics. Start with Look, Now Look Again. A bit more out-there, but just as suitable for our time off was the recent reissues of Brigitte Fontaine’s Comme à la Radio and Comme à la Radio – On Air through WeWantSounds, truly essential stuff if you like your 1970s pop music avant-garde, jazzy, and French in equal measure. Multi-national, Berlin-based trio Gordan has also been working with and between different argots, specifically Balkan folklore and what I guess could be called post-noise rock. Their third album Gastarbeiter now draws on songs written by labour migrants between the SFRY and the FRG. Gripping stuff! So is gamut inc’s second album of the year, Music for Air. A bit more spontaneous and less demanding than Radiating, it still manages to make a MIDI-controlled organ sound like nothing else. Speaking of pipe instruments, Mary Jane Leach is back and you shouldn’t miss out on her new record, and while you are at it, give viibra’s interpretation of Niels Lyhne Løkkegaard’s Softenings for 7 Flutes a spin as well. For the even quieter stuff, turn to Towards a Cosmic Music: Noise Minimalism, Norway, 1991-2001, a compilation that feels like it has been overdue for decades now and features a lot of good stuff from all the folks that you would expect—Supersilent, Deathprod, Lasse Marhaug, et al. Two other compilations I really loved this year were Ethiopian Musics 1971 and La Ola Nocturna: Experimental songs and deviant pop from the Spanish 80’s.  And last but not least, the reissue of Henning Christiansen’s Op. 70 – Symphony Natura immediately became a top ten 2026 contender for me. Because yes, EOTY is upon us. I’ll be in touch.

Thank you for your attention and until next time.