Welcome to the ninth edition of my mail-outs, all of which have been archived on my website.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)

— Some articles take a while. This one has been, ahem, brewing for years: I conducted some of the first background interviews for it in 2020. For DJ LAB, I wrote a two-part series about club culture’s entanglement with the alcohol industry. The first part zooms in on gastronomic aspects and the (inter-)dependence between the two industries, while the second one takes a more critical look at how brands have historically used the scene as a billboard.

— For my research, I drew extensively on Selling the Night. When Club Culture Meets Brands, Advertising and the Creative Industries by Andy Crysell, and briefly reviewed the book in a stand-alone piece for the same magazine. Also at DJ LAB, I profiled Augsburg’s City Club for my on-going series of club portraits. 

— After having written about the current Spotify exodus, i.e. the growing number of indie bands pulling their catalogue from the streaming service, for Die ZEIT recently, I discussed the topic on the radio twice. My conversation with Rebecca Link for WDR’s Westart has been archived, the one on Bremen Zwei a few days later hasn’t. 

— Another radio piece that wasn’t made available was a short one for NDR Kultur about the German classical music charts and what they, in comparison to Apple Music’s Classical Top 100, tell us about how streaming has changed the … uh, is genre the proper term here? Anyhow, I also used Luminate’s latest midyear report as a springboard to discuss a related topic with Martin Böttcher at DLF Kultur’s Tonart: The shrinking market share of today’s mega hits and what questions that might raise about social coherence more generally. 

— Speaking of which, does the rise of AI slop, artificial artists such as Velvet Sundown, or AI-generated tunes snuck onto really existing musicians’ streaming accounts have an impact on our relationship with reality more generally? I think so. For the new issue of der Freitag, I gave an overview on the recent developments and tried to ask some fundamental questions. It should be online soon.

— You know what else had an ambivalent impact on media and thus culture, society, and perhaps politics? VICE. For a roundtable in DLF Kultur’s Kompressor podcast, I got together with fellow millennials Kais Harrabi and Caren Miesenberger to the discuss the new MUBI documentary Vice Is Broke on the zine-turned-media-behemoth’s rise and fall as well as, because that seemed appropriate, the ZDF-neo show Chabos, which predominantly takes place in 2006.

— So that was zero English-language content, but summer’s coming to an end—which means that label owners are coming back from their well-deserved vacation and finally announce all those records for which I have written the blurbs. Donna Regina return to Karaoke Kalk on October 31st with their new album Lilac, which coincides with the release of Uncontrollable Thoughts by Anushka Chkheidze + Robert Lippok on Morr Music (first teaser here). Hallow Ground has even announced a whopping three new records. Martina Berther and Philipp Schlotter’s sophomore collaborative album Silence Will Never Die is even better than the first one, while Raphael Loher’s Hug of Gravity (something for the Basinski nerds) is one of the strongest ones that label has put out this year. Both are out on October 17th. Also, there’s a new DarkSonicTales album called UnKnown that will be released in mid-September as a special limited-run release, and there’s a lot more coming from the Hallow Ground camp. 

— A few days ago, I finally picked up a copy of the massive 69 Years to the Treason Trail. The Drill Hall Arts Advocacy Project 4LP set that comes with a booklet in which I am credited as a translator of, among other things, Stella Chiweshe lyrics (in collaboration with Percy Zvomuya, who transcribed and translated the original Shona into English)! What an honour to find my name next to hers. The Haus der Kulturen der Welt team and the Keleketla! collective as well as publisher Archive Books have done an outstanding job. Currently, the release is only being sold at HKW, both in situ and through its web store. 

— I’ve also reviewed a few records. In the latest issue of Musikexpress, you’ll find some words on the new albums by Meitei and Guedra Guedra. Neither is online yet. 

— Lastly, I talked about myself for a change. Martin Eugen Raabenstein interviewed me (available in both German and English) for his relevance & return series.

+++++ Some Unsorted Recommendations

I have become wary of the term »value.« Whenever I read that streaming has supposedly devalued music, I just don’t know what that means. I need someone to explain to me how music was valued before the advent of DSPs, what that means in financial terms—money and value are distinct concepts—and, most importantly, what »value« even is. You see, YouTuber Unlearning Economics (who non-ironically has a PhD in economics) has outlined in a very concise video how the debate about the meaning of this fundamental term is basically never-ending and that nobody really knows what they’re talking about when they use it. Hence, I was immediately interested when I came across ethnomusicologist Timothy D. Taylor’s Making Value. Music, Capital, and the Social. Taylor’s series of essays primarily understand value and its creation as specific actions within different musical communities. The definition(s) of value he works with are somewhat fuzzy, but again: Nobody really has any fucking clue what value is, so this exploration of different ways of understanding and creating value was very interesting, precisely because it tried to find concrete examples for a very abstract concept. Next to S. Alexander Reed’s Assimilate. A Critical History of Industrial Music, it was a favourite among the more academic-minded books I’ve read this year, though that author clearly writes from the perspective of a fan and member of the subculture who also doesn’t shy away from harsh criticism and the occasional punchline. It’s a good intro to a subculture with which I haven’t had much contact over the course of my life. Speaking of genres of which I only have passing knowledge, in the past few years I have gotten a bit more into death metal. After my mandatory visit to Hamburg’s Fischkopp record store while I was in town a few weeks back, I came home with the newest tape by Cryptic Brood with the charming title Necrotic Flesh Bacteria. Starts off pretty hardcore-y and thrash-y, but gets more death-y towards the end and remains fantastic throughout. It sent me down a rabbithole, or more precisely made me catch up with Blood Harvest’s recent output—one of my go-to death metal labels. I fell in love once more with Blood Spore’s Fungal Warfare Upon All Life (what a title!) with its crushing blend of doom and death, and also I finally gave Gutvoid a spin. If you like Pitchfork-approved cosmic/proggy death metal bands like Tomb Mold or Blood Incantation, check out their latest album Durance of Lightless Horizon. If straight-up metal isn’t your thing, you might still want to check out the new album by All Men Unto Me, a.k.a. Rylan Gleave of Scottish avant-garde black metallers Ashenspire because it’s one of the best you’ll hear all year. Gleave’s previous album had dealt with his transition and the effects of hormone therapy on his voice register, making it both incredibly personal and nerdy. Requiem deals with, well, mourning, but also christianity and its legacy. While that is still pretty metal, the entire album only occasionally ventures into doom or black territory—this is essentially a chamber pop/art rock record with a stunning vocal performance. Speaking of which, Richard Youngs has one, or rather several new records out, because that dude just never stops banging out the good stuff. Zerkelus is all vocal and drone, vocal-drone stuff and one of the best things he’s done since he played 121 different chords in a row (take that, Schönberg) and sang over that. Still speaking of unique vocal performances, have you seen Monk in Pieces yet? You really should. Embarrassingly, I have never really listened to Meredith Monk’s music before, but this charming documentary that at its core is fairly conventional and yet has a few tricks up its sleeve (including the most imaginative and hilarious use of Zoom video call recordings in motion picture history) immediately sent me down a Discogs rabbit hole. Lastly, I had an interesting discussion with mailing list member and Kimochi owner m50 about his DJ set at the 10-year-anniversary edition of the Diane’s Hunting Club festival: a sort of mega-mix that drew on the track selection of his previous sets there, in chronological order. Naturally, I was very keen on checking out the recording. It’s a beautiful ride, full of tunes (Closer Musik! Reload! Woob!) that made me quite nostalgic without ever having been to what appears to be the most elusive dance music festival in North America. Lastly, I am happy to report that spaghetti squash season has begun. This is one of my favourite autumn dishes.