“The music is both atmospheric and aggressive, although the bleeping strikes me as more ambient than kosmische. Either way, a cool tape.” Byron Coley in The Wire 475, September 2023
The Wire 475
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“If a tape loops infinitely, where does it start and end?
A new split cassette from anonymous electronic artist and bassist bleed Air and Shenzhen legends Hualun ruminates quietly on that enquiry. The beginnings and conclusions are not clear. There is an A-side and a B-side, one by bleed Air and one by Hualun, but the labels glued to each side of the cassette shell might as well be interchangeable. (…)
These two sides are, then, inextricably and umbilically linked. They both occupy a contemporary vantage point overlooking some of 1970s German electronic music’s finest moments, completely in tune with the sonic adventuring that the likes of Conrad Schnitzler and a select pioneering few bravely undertook.” (…) Mat Smith, Further. <- read the full review)
A minimal synth EP, garnished with harsh noise, composed entirely on a Yamaha DX7. Despite the minimal setup, it creates an intense, sometimes uplifting, sometimes eerie atmosphere.. We believe that you’ve rarely heard the DX7 like that before.
Artist Robin Barnick sold his DX7 a long time ago – it was a rocking DX7IIFD in excellent shape… and yes, he regrets it, a lot. There was just too little space in his apartment and he thought the NI FM7 would do too. Far from it. Here’s what he has to say about the album:
“At the time, I guess it was around 2001, I was trying to program the DX7 and accidentally deleted all of the presets when I started to experiment with emagic’s SoundDiver. Every single patch was reset to the “Init” sound, a simple sine wave.
OK, never mind, I thought, and then got hooked when I started manipulating this ultra simple patch live, with the help of Sounddiver’s quite impressive capabilities.
I was fascinated by how easy it now was to elicit experimental sounds from this otherwise difficult-to-operate machine. I didn’t care about sequencing, so this is just me, playing simple chord progressions and notes with the left hand and manipulating them with my right hand on the mouse, twiddling SoundDiver’s faders. All was recorded live on Minidisc (in mono).
At the time I really wasn’t sure whether the music was good at all, so I put the MD aside … and forgot it. When I remembered it again some time ago, I spent endless hours searching – all my MDs were there, just not this one. When I was about to give up, I rediscovered it, edited the material and subsequently processed the tracks with some few effects.”
Robin Barnick resides in Niederkassel-Lülsdorf-Ranzel, in the lovely rural-industrial no one’s land between Cologne and Bonn, in the wild, wild western part of Germany and at the heart of Europe.
