Bermuda Fest 2023: Hidden in th Triangle

  • Beitrags-Kategorie:Live

On the first weekend in June we will be celebrating the naming of the cultural Bermuda Triangle with a three-day festival here in Berlin/Friedrichshain. We will infect all your senses with jam sessions, art punks, acid breaks, creative workshops, theater performances, a marketplace and anything else your imagination can dictate.

We will have wonderful artists such as:
Vertical67 – DR. KONTRA – TXTX – Vodor L Zeck – Axiom – Briain – Kurihara – Raving Mad Carlos – Puppenmucke – Daniel Matz – and…sure..also some Octobird

The exact location is hidden on the flyer. Just follow the “Merkelraute” (like you did for so many years 😉
Can you guess where it is?

The events are running:
Friday from        8 p.m. to 6 a.m
Saturday from   3 p.m. to 6 a.m
Sunday from      3 p.m. to 8 p.m

Free Entry, hope to see you all there!

Octobird Liveset @ Vetomat DIY Fundraiser

  • Beitrags-Kategorie:Live

At 18th of march you all are invited to our big big fundraising party at Bethaniendamm 26 10997 berlin!

We’re getting the first proper temperatures here in Berlin. A good chance to spend a day at the historic RAXXXHAUS. Starting at 4pm we will have food, screen printing, tatoos and a shitload of music.

There will be a whole bunch of Bands starting from 6pm and then DJ action from 1am.
I’m gonna provide the missing link between both worlds, playing an electronic Live Set around Midnight.

Everything for the good cause of keeping DIY spaces in FHain alive!

For more info come over to the Vetomat Website!

Octobird Salad #14 | Dub Abstraxions

I’ve always maintained a very moody relationship with dub influenced music. I deeply admire all the ingredients: The circulating, stumbling drum patterns, the all-consuming tape echos and of course….bass! But the final implementation always carries the risk of ending up in cultural or musical cliches. With Dub Techno there often seems to be a far to narrow defined set of tools of echos and comb filters mixed with minimal techno put together somewhere in the late 90s. That’s why I felt much more successful discovering influences of dub in all kinds of musical directions.

The following collection of tracks is a rather weird one. I would totally agree with someone arguing that this isn’t really dub music. It’s not. But it carries a lot of the mindset of dub music as a ritual, hypnotizing art form. Less researched, more recovered from different corners of my music collection.

TRACKLIST

Tribe of Colin – Alasallmenhathbeencreatedequal
Vladislav Delay – Avanne
Move D & Pete Namlook – Footer
Stefan Goldmann – Streams
Marcellis – Hopeless
Roger 23 – Future State
Simon Haydo – Parade of Unhappy
Peter Graf York – Jahlette Sensor Excel
Al Wootton – Wychwood Dub
Павел Миляков – Silent E
Madteo – Same Way (Interior Paramours Mix)
Aybee – Moon’s Whisper
Efdemin – A Land Unknown

Octobird Salad #13 | Rusty Technics

Oh how I miss these dirty club nights! Plunging into a muddy sludge of sweat and adrenaline, floating on the far-reaching waves of kick drums. Even in a city like Berlin there hasn’t been much going on in the last 2 years apart from one or two pub discos and private raves on trashy improvised sound systems. Anyway, we’ll still mark this one as a hope-inspiring warm-up exercise. Keep the dream alive!

TRACKLISZT:

  1. Das Ding: Somewhere [Minimal Wave]
  2. Nick Klein: The Worst Band In The World [BANK Records NYC]
  3. HellboII: The Brainwashed Masses [Panzerkreuz Records]
  4. Ratsnake: ПЛЯЖ
  5. Cristiano Balducci: Tesla Series
  6. Gladio: Of Hyperborea
  7. Gesloten Cirkel: Yamagic [Moustache Techno]
  8. Mannerfelt/Haydo: Radio Mohave [Avian]
  9. Grey People: Cryogenically Frozen
  10. DJ Spider: Inner Earth Existance [Instruction]
  11. Ikpathua: The Lair [Noorden]
  12. Brooks: Rlf [Mantis Recordings]
  13. rHr.: Ologram
  14. Grey People: Too Much Relevance [Public System Recordings]

The Intergalactic Bimstein Returns

Phew! It’s already been 6 months since my last appereance on Pr0gramma with my Bimstein EP and obviously I went back into the ethernet shadows after that. Not really – I rather went into the shadows of my studio racks, taking a recent mixture of changes and chances as an inducement to rebuild my studio setup. And as a result of some quite drastic setup changes there also went quite some time into learning new machines and software and teach them to communicate with each other.

So let’s take a few steps back and remember where we took off, shall we?! Back in April I had my last appearence on Austin Cassels radio show. And while it’s rather unlikely…maybe some of you missed that one. If that’s you…or if you just wanna listen back to some Octobird stuff, here is the set I played on Austin’s show:

TRACKLIST:

Andreas Grosser – Rhythmic Desert
UFOCUS – Fun With Fractals
Octobird – Desert Hall (unreleased track)
Dona – Vrs 2
D’Marc Cantu – Another Number
DJ Spider & Franklin De Costa – F Planet
Simon Haydo – The Territories Marked
S Olbricht – Asterid
oxvac – 7
Octobird – Monowai
DJ Spider – Inner Earth Existance
Israel Vines – Rage Appropriate
Container – Peppered
Don’t DJ – Hexentrix (Jordan GCZ Remix)

So much for the warmup and hopefully I’ll be back soon with some actual “news” 😉

Octobird’s “Bimstein” out on Pr0gramma Records

  • Beitrags-Kategorie:Releases

Back home at Pr0gramma, back to some rough and raw structures. I’ve always been bad with timing and so I present theses rough and earthy tunes just as the brighter days are coming. And while I may be a bit better with words I stick to the valued opinion of Pr0gramma’s Ismael:

Back in the key of Octobird, we return to the pristine dynamics of Bimstein. From the onset, Palm Slap leans in with sluggish tape edit styles, tight electro rhythms, and playful earworms. Evolving into what feels like a moody 5th gen platformer, things take a more metallic heavy-rhythm turn. Controlling the color palette is a clear Octobird skillset. Passing halfway, melodic tension emerges once again from the rhythmic detour making for a very narratively guided trio of closing tracks. From the heavy side-pumping of saturated echoes to the crazy well-crafted perc throughout, PR16 feels like the inevitable polished gem of a closer. There is no lag here, just pure diamond quality.

Tentacle Loot #26 | JHM – Exhaustive Portal EP

Whenever peripheral areas in music are explored, whether in terms of speed, complexity or aggressiveness, there is always a critical point. Regardless of whether we are irradiated at a gabba party and crave for a climax that we have long since passed, or if we boastfully exchange our favorite breakcore tracks until the complex rhythm structures hit us as a wave of snare drums. At a certain point we cross the threshold from art to sport. And while some feel right at home in this spot, I personally often balance on that very partition, driven by a mixture of curiosity and skepticism. My own approach to music is just far too emotional and physical to be charmed only by my left brain hemisphere. And so, after this highly subjective process of elimination, in the end there aren’t that many who still manage to convey a physical or emotional message under the flag of hardcore-whatever.

JHM (aka Jens Masimov) is probably a little too smart for that.

In his self-description he describes himself as a multimedia artist working with ritualistic distortion, and his musical mainspring could hardly be better described. Located in a gloomy no-man’s-land somewhere between driving techno and gabba, he doesn’t seem to care too much about whether he could under-challenge some and overwhelm others. Instead, he fearlessly dives into the very core of the ecstatic ritual of contemporary club culture. With stoically hammering, distorted kick drums and tirelessly circulating sequences, he keeps us in a sustained state of physical exhaustion at just around 150bpm, which can ultimately only be maintained by fading out all conscious thought processes. Masimov’s talent finally reveals itself in his ability to maintain this state. And although you intuitively feel overwhelmed at first, he still allows room for improvement and allows the individual elements of his music air to breathe. And so ultimately he leaves us with the last remaining conscious decision, whether we want to swim or run.

A Blog is not a Blog is not a Blog: Three human resources to identify high quality music

  • Beitrags-Kategorie:Music Culture

Probably every person who manages to cross the magical Cobain-Morrison-line of 27 years will experience one or the other profound global change in the course of his life, either due to historical or to technological progress. The changes in the music journalistic landscape and thus the way in which we discover and perceive music is probably one of the profound changes in my (average) existence.

While we used to sit in front of the TV until late at night to catch some of the more remote formats on MTv, while we recorded local radio stations, being grateful that John Peel was even broadcasted as far as Berlin and while we followed in the semi-mainstream music magazines looking for creative misfits, we now live in times of limitless diversity. And while print magazines are still looking for new horizons, the classic blog is almost dying out again. Replaced, it seems, with algorithms and influencer playlists on Spotify. And yet besides the little big players of online magazines (Fact, XL8R, etc.) there are still plenty of smaller formats. Well-arranged, cozy places where it’s only about one thing: staying true to the music. You just have to find them!

At this point I would like to remedy the situation a little and showcase my three favorite (kinda-)blogs and at the same time present three quite different formats and approaches.

Read on...

Tentacle Loot #25 | Fuewa – Complete Earthworks

Fuewa‘s second-born Complete Earthworks already celebrated its fifth birthday recently. And, given today’s musical attention span, it should probably be in a sub-category of unheard classics. But as much as releases suffer from those brief attention peaks nowadays, I also have the feeling that the ephemeral trends of these days no longer really disappear from the scene, but rather retreat to niches where they are still celebrated and loved. And therefore are worth being mentioned even if they weren’t exactly fresh from the eaves.

In addition, Fuewa has put together a completely timeless album with his still most recent work, which despite all this has received far too little attention. At least if you believe the numbers on Bandcamp, Spotify and elsewhere. And that regardless of the fact, that Fuewa‘s label of choice, Sonic Router, did took the right turn at a time when the word Future Garage was already part of our collective memory and went on towards something … well … I guess more post-future. Once again they deconstructed the well-worn legacy of Dub- and 2-Step, Garage and IDM and explored alternative timelines with great tape releases by Broshuda and Fuewa. But while Broshuda dismantled his drum patterns until he produced more or less ambient from beats, Fuewa‘s strength lies in the discipline of not achieving musical renewal through limitless complexity. As much as his pieces are influenced by the pioneers of Dub, Jungle and IDM, he retains very driving and repetitive structures and thus leans on a sound that at the same time was mainly shaped and released on Livity Sound (above all Kowton‘s Utility), who married UK garage and driving techno in equal measure. And yet one can clearly hear that Fuewa doesn’t only have a club surrounding as the cathedral of its sound in the back of its head, but also us aging home listeners. Therefore he weaves timeless melodies into his earthy sound textures, lets ambient pieces flow in and takes us on a journey across a planet that seemed so familiar to us.

For me personally, Complete Earthworks – along with the already mentioned Utility by Kowton – is one of the most elaborate albums of this very special straightforward form of UK Garage and should therefore be brought to the mind especially of those who haven’t sorted it into their memories yet. Especially since we are slowly but surely facing a wildly gesticulating drum & bass revival.

Octobird Salad #11 | Muscle Memory

Even if the vinyl supplies in my apartment are slowly starting to displace me, I’ve always been a fan of digital DJing. At least when I’m standing behind the wheels myself. And in this playground I’m finally in the process of replacing my totally undersized MP3s with Flac files once and for all. And again in the same process I got infected with a serious case of audiophily and catch myself diggin for all these ultra polished electro tracks to convince myself that all the effort of re-encoding and re-recording is worth the effort. So Instead of the usual insider tips, this time I simply present a best of electro on steroids.

As an old friend of trashy sizzling acid music with a constant allergy to perfection, I am still quite reluctant when basses fly by slightly over-inflated. But there are a few who have mastered the double game of knocking out perfectly produced tracks that stand the ravages of time without getting tired.

Morphology have been part of this group since their very first releases on Zyntax Motorcity in the early 2010s. And my good friend Vertical67 with his label Vortex Traks was lucky enough to get some of their great pieces a few years ago.

Also part of the immediate vicinity are Mechatronica, who have set a well-guarded milestone in Electro when they released their “I Am Mensch” 12 “inch by Zeta Reticula and Helga Neuer.

Marco Bernardi is one of my absolute favorites next to D’Marc Cantu (who for once does not appear here). His efforts to produce club tracks in which he explores the rhythmic fringes, exposes us to dystopias and at the same time puts us into a deep trance, are unparalleled.

And from that point it gets dirty again with circulating, endless loops of drooling acid by Boris Divider, Isabella and Clatterbox. Including the title track of the Murder-Capital full length masterpiece by Gesloten Cirkel “Submit-X”.

TRACKLIST:

Inhalts-Ende

That's the bottom of the sky.

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