Welcome to the seventh edition of my mail-outs, all of which have been archived on my website.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)
— The last mail-out was sent hours before I discussed a new book on Taylor Swift live on air over at DLF Kultur’s Tonart. Kevin Evers’ There’s Nothing Like This. The Strategic Genius of Taylor Swift has been—iN MY pErSOnaL oPINioN—simply been DeepL’d by his German publisher and then went to the press practically unedited. I imagine it to be a good read in the original English, though.
— Also in my last mail-out, I mentioned two different panel discussions broadcast live by Studio Néau and Cashmere Radio. They are both now archived on the former’s SoundCloud page. In the first, I was moderating a discussion between Berlin Clubcommission’s Marcel Weber and his Viennese counterpart Martina Brunner on how clubs try to get out of the manifold economic crises with which they’re currently confronted. The second saw me sitting down in the hot seat, trying to sketch out existing and emerging alternatives to the streaming economy status quo together with Wolfgang Brauneis.
— You know what’s an alternative to the likes of Spotify? Buying records. Once more, we’ve put together a list of the best 50 vinyl records (English/German) that helped us through another terrible six months over at HHV-Mag. The new Concepción Huerta album didn’t make the cut, but I recommended it in a separate review (English/German) nonetheless. I’ve also dusted off a profile of Akiko Yano that I had written in 2019 for Spex (RIP) for the same magazine. I am much more happy with the reworked version (English/German). HHV-Mag’s annual Summer of Jazz dossier puts a focus on Library Music, so I wrote a lil’ history of this non-genre and tried to also interrogate its status quo (English/German).
— If you think that’s a lot of text written for only one magazine, there’s more. I’ve written a two-part history of music in the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, with part one (English/German) explaining the intricacies of a music industry under market socialism and part two (English/German) tracing the emergence and idiosyncrasies of the Yugoslav underground in the 1980s. This is an article that I had wanted to write since I picked up an instalment of the excellent Ex Yu Electronica compilation series in Ljubljana when I was in town for a symposium in 2018. I am very happy that I got the chance to finally write these pieces that loosely pick up on similar ones on Japan (Part 1, Part 2—English version unfortunately lost when the website was redone) and Anadolu Pop/Rock and the music of Turkish guest workers in the FRG (Part 1, Part 2—also no English version available for these for the same reason, sorry).
— In my on-going series of club portraits for DJ LAB, I have profiled Stuttgart’s Romantica just in time for its tenth anniversary.
— A while ago, I also interviewed Brìghde Chaimbeul—when the small pipes player’s new album wasn’t announced yet—about her career and her Monheim Triennale-commissioned work for the festival’s Monheim Papers article series (English/German). Much to my delight, all these contributions have been turned into a bilingual book published by the more-than-excellent Wolke Verlag.
+++++ Some Unsorted Recommendations
Like anyone else with a MUBI subscription, I’ve been re-watching Twin Peaks lately, and while I recognise its many, many technical flaws more clearly now than when I first saw it, it still slaps and is worth revisiting. Also, did you know that subscribing to the Verbund der Öffentlichen Bibliotheken Berlins (VÖBB), something that costs you ten euros per year and can be done simply through providing them with some German home address, gives you access to three different video streaming services? I’ve watched documentaries on the late Sven-Åke Johansson (made by Antoine Prum who runs Ni Vi Ni Connu, a label for which I regularly write some press releases), Peter Brötzmann, Conny Plank, and the subcultural art scene of late-90s Berlin on Filmfriend in pretty much one sitting recently. A lot of bang for very little buck, if you ask me. Having read Steven Underwood’s Even When It Makes No Sense. The Story of Broken Flag and Marcello Ambrosini’s Post-Industriale. La Scena Italiana Anni ‘80, I spent a lot of time listening to some of the artists and records that played a major part in them. So far, Controlled Bleeding’s Head Chalk was the most fascinating for me, but I think I haven’t come very far in my journey yet. Apart from that, I’d like to point you to HHV-Mag’s half-of-the-year list for more recommendations, specifically urging you to give Annahstasia’s Tether a spin. I didn’t expect to fall in love with an album that sounds like something the High Fidelity record store clerks (in the movie, not TV adaptation) would cherish in the year 2025, but here we are. Also, there’s a new Dope Purple album, so tune in and zone out, etc.