Welcome to the sixth edition of my mail-outs, all of which have been archived on my website. This one is coming a little earlier than usual because I have two radio appearances coming up on Sunday.

I will be moderating an online radio panel discussion with Berlin Clubcommission’s Marcel Weber and Vienna Club Commission’s Martina Brunner on possible ways out of the current crisis plaguing clubs in Germany, Austria, and beyond. The panel will be broadcast live by Eupen’s Studio Néau and Berlin’s Cashmere Radio on Sunday at 3 p.m. German time. Right after that, at 4 p.m., I will also discuss alternatives to the status quo of the streaming economy with Wolfgang Brauneis, this time as the one who’ll do most of the talking. Both conversations were organised by the fantastic Meakusma crew and will be held in German. You can find more information here.

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)

— After writing a similar piece on SoundCloud a while ago, I had wanted to go in-depth on the history of Boiler Room in DJ Lab even before the company was acquired by Superstruct, but then stuff got in the way. I managed to finally finish the article before my vacation in mid-May, and was mighty chuffed when it came out while I was frying in the Greek sun.

— Another thing that sort of happened before I fucked off to Crete was that composer Ehsan Saboohi got in touch with me to ask for permission to reprint an excerpt from a review in which I spoke about the work of his Post-Orientalism Music label and platform. That didn’t feel like enough to me, so I wrote a lil’ essay on post-orientalism as a genre that was published alongside reissues of ten (!) entries in his Post-Orientalism Series and an additional four (!) instalments of his Politics-Aesthetics Series. You can find those and read my text on Post-Orientalism Music’s Bandcamp.

— Over at DLF Kultur, I gave an update on how smaller and medium-sized festivals in Germany are currently doing (spoiler: not too well) and today, a little after 3 p.m., will discuss the German translation of Kevin Evers’ new book There’s Nothing Like This. The Strategic Genius of Taylor Swift, by which I mean that I won’t only talk about the contents of the book but also the translation itself. I am very, very, very certain that it was done with DeepL and that the results were barely edited before publication. Yikes.

— For HHV-Mag, I wrote about the new Bill Orcutt Guitar Quartet’s HausLive4, already their second live record—but quite different from the first (German/English). 

+++++ Some Unsorted Recommendations

Much like everyone else, I absolutely loved Céline Sciamma’s Portrait de la jeune fille en feu, so when I came across Naissance des pieuvres (Water Lilies) on MUBI (as part of a swimming pool-themed special, no less), that felt like a no-brainer. It’s a very beautiful movie. I’ve also finally managed to see Whiplash on a lazy Saturday evening while visiting a friend and loved that film’s inherent ambiguity when dealing with its subject matter, a mentor/mentee relationship at a prestigious jazz conservatory. I recommend this one highly if you haven’t seen it more than a decade after its release. A few days ago, I fished the Soundtrack to a Coup d’État DVD out of my mailbox after noise troublemaker Mattin had tipped me off to it—very much looking forward to this one, and I imagine some of you might be interested in it as well. Speaking of music, I somewhat prophetically gave Mariah Carey’s back catalogue a spin right before her new single came out. While the latter left me rather cold, I came back from my little deep dive into the depths of her discography with plenty of gems in hand. Apart from that, there was little that really caught my ear besides the new album by coffret de bijoux, a French-Canadian emo-black-metal one-woman-project, whose new album qunaiqû nèjautsè on Canti Eretici picks up on the whole Sadness and Violet Cold sort of thing but is quite unique on several levels. I also loved personal friend and mailing list member Nicolussi’s new tape Fairly Used, a joint release between Falt and Epileptic Media, for which he drew on recordings culled from cassettes that he found in old dictaphones. Ghostly stuff. Something that also felt kind of spooky at times was Selling the Night. When Club Culture Meets Brands, Advertising, and the Creative Industries by Andy Crysell. While the book would have benefitted from more rigorous editing—Crysell both loves to give his interview subjects a lot of space and going on the occasional-though-not-always-necessary tangent—it was a fascinating read by a writer familiar with both worlds trying to approach the respective sides’ perspectives with nuance and fairness. Besides all that, I recommend giving broccoli another try, preferably in the context of a risotto.