#german minimal techno

[tsoi45]

Kraftwerk - Tour de France Soundtracks (2003)

Gonna be honest - until I came across Kraftwerk's Tour de France, the bleep-bloop sounds of German men-machine had never clicked for me. Their music had always sounded like half-outdated predictions of what technology would be like in the year 2000 or the theme to some local evening news program. It still does - but I have now learned to love the robot.

It was my fascination with concept albums that led to me falling head over heels for Tour de France. In fact, I would go so far as to call this a "hyper-concept album", as each and every lyric, song title, every single time signature and instrumental down to the very minute, singular sound effect, contribute to the euphoric feeling of braving through l'Enfer du Nord down through the Champs-Élysées. From the exhalations of an exhausted cyclist in the title track to the pre or post-race medical trials of Elektro Kardiogramm and the even more clinical Vitamin (which to me evoked the advertising of energy / health drinks that surges with the Tour), every piece of imagery here serves a purpose, showcasing the huge business, and the sport, of the Tour.

But it's not just the cycling and the vitamin drinks. As is their trademark, Kraftwerk have always had an obsession with the creeping influence of technology on tradition. Take the lyrics to Etape 2, where in just four robotically-sung verses you get a vision of the shiny futurism that the Tours of the future now encompass:

Information from Radio Tour Transmissions from the television Reporting from a motorbike Camera, video and photo

Gone are the days where cyclists were only seen by French fans and passers-by - the vision of the Tour Kraftwerk presents is ultra-connected, broadcast worldwide with cameras pointing at each pedal, fans connected to the radio, to the television, seeing photos, watching videos - at every moment new updates flooding the screens of millions. It's been incredible to look at footage of the original 1903 Tour de France and, with this album in mind, comparing it to the world of today - to see how in less than a century, the athletic men-machine of our dreams became real.

If this album doesn't make you feel in awe of the hyper-technological age we're living in, let it at least inspire you to go out and go for a pedal. For the robot.

[machazer]

German techno sucks my blank mind.

[panzertranse]

Monolake- Television Tower

[pettybourgeoiz]

✰Bourgeoiz Music Discovery✰

[chevvy-yates]

103.1 TECHNOI⚡︎E FM

A fictive/headcanon radio station fit for Cyberpunk 2077 presenting German ebm artists. It is Ryder's overall favorite station he likes to listen to every day.

The first of two spotify playlists with a collection of songs I imagine to be one of Ryder's favorite radio stations (in my headcanon) he listens to when he e.g. drives around in the city or got it running in the background in his apartment. Had a hard time chosing the word 'Technoise" for one of them, yet I went with this one for the more ebm, industrial and dark wave focused tracks. I think it does fit better to the overall 'Technoise lore' (see further below) than the hard tech stuff on the second playlist. Some of the artists are already in business since the 80s/90s and especially Faderhead I would have loved to have in the game as he did a whole EP named '2077' dedicated to Cyberpunk when it came out. Overall these songs sound very 'tech'-like and each of them has this base of a repeating beat or melody and even words that stick to your ears. Some of them have actually lyrics, too, some are English, most in German.

—

109.6 HELL BUNKER FM

Mostly a hard techno playlist Ryder listens to, especially when he's working out. Most of these songs get played at 'Chrome Chamber Rave' a fictive/headcanon event occuring every 1st Saturday per month at the 'Hell Bunker', located in the underground of the Dark Matter Bld. Japantown.

This one is for the more hardcore ravers. When you listened to the other one first then for this one you may understand my decision why I've splitted it up. The beats are harder, there is much less to non lyrics and singing – all is focused on beats, repetition and other sounds. Wanna work out? Take this list if you like it. However, I've placed a few more 'melodic' ones in between so you can take a little break from the harder tracks. These are mostly by the artist 'Klanglos'. Also placed some with opera singing (Venezia, Hardtechno Anthem, Bella Ciao, Fortuna and Ameno) as it is the kind of techno Thyjs surprisingly will find good (because Ry will definitely listen to his music at home and even drag soldier boy to CCR).

—

All cover artwork done by me.

⚠️ READ: Please do not repost/reupload any of my art (the cover pics) here or to any other platform, or I will be forced to do anything to get it annihilated.

Why two?

There's two of them as I wanted to separate the (hard) techno beats from the more ebm (electro body music), dark wave and industrial ones which I also minimized to German (and one Austrian) artists only. I like the idea it is a station that plays only German as I've read in one of the many lore books that 'Technoise' is a German music genre:

"Technoise and its various derivations dominate much of the German scene. If you're hip, you already know about Technoise. If not, listen up. Technoise is quite popular with the discerning young punk; it was popularized by Germany's own NetWerk actually, you've got your Overlay style from London, Jazznetic from Rotterdam and Echo from Frankfurt. In addition, there are people producing Frock (Fractal Rock) all over the place. The good thing is, Technoise is quite easy to produce. You only need a small computer, some software and you're ready to buzz. Those of you with a message might miss the political attitude, but you're missing the point. Technoise is strictly for partying, tripping and dancing. People meet and dance up to the runner's point. Maybe that's a political statement in itself, oder?" — Eurosource Plus The New Eurotheater Sourcebook for Cyberpunk

Now I do not know how exactly the 'Lore Technoise' does sound as I can imagine it very well having more rock elements (as they speak of 'overlay style from london' (like punk back then swapping over to Germany in the mid or was it late? 70s -> German punk bands formed but also the New Wave came to exist, spread into the goth genre and so on, also Industrial so both ways; rock and electronic elements etc.) so I may have my own headcanon for it, while others maybe interpret it differently?

I definitely see some political messages in some ebm and industrial songs as well but a lot also are focused on something else less political. And if we go pure (hard) techno, it's definitely just for 'partying, tripping and dancing'. I can't say if it will stay like this, if I delete some songs or add new but for now I think it's good. If you want you can follow one or even both playlists. I would be happy about it though I know it's not everyone's music taste. ;)

And yeah ofc I placed Ryder into the covers, it's playlists for him, so yeah. If I ever do it with my other boys I'll do that the same way.

–

I'm also working on a list for Chrome Chamber Rave that will be even longer and have more songs by the artists that are already on Hell Bunker, but it's more for personal reasons as I started to dive so deeo into it I also searched pics that help me imgine how the location looks etc. Maybe I'll make another post for it, maybe not.

[randomvarious]

Today's compilation:

Superlongevity 2 2001 Minimal Techno / Microhouse / Tech-House

A little bit surprised by just how much this one actually failed to click with me here. I've never really ventured all that much into the realms of the more minimally-flavored styles of dance like minimal techno and microhouse before, but this release is so highly rated on Discogs that I thought I was gonna enjoy it; but I didn't.

See, I guess what's always drawn me to a whole lot of different types of music in the first place is the overall dynamism—that is, music with rhythmic and melodic layers to it that has a bunch of different elements coalescing around each other to form a fully-fledged song. And when something like that doesn't end up taking place, I'm far less likely to be riveted.

Now, two things here: one, to be very clear, I'm not posting about the much more popular double-disc DJ mix version of Superlongevity 2; what I plugged into today is the double *12-inch* version of it, which plucked out a handful of tracks that appeared on the DJ mix and presented them in their full, unmixed versions.

And two, no shade at all to the makers of these quieter styles of dance music, either. I hear the innovation in some of these tracks in which this 'less is more' mentality bears a unique type of fruit that can't be yielded with a more maximal ethos. For example, the approach to creating a backbeat with this stuff can be a much more meticulous process than it would be with a regular four-on-the-floor tune, because that backbeat is just so much more prominent on tracks like these. And a song like Dimbiman's "Hōkūle'A," which embeds tiny specks of unidentifiable vocal samples into its backbeat, serves as a prime example of a tune that doesn't overlook its most foundational element, which some terrific house tunes are able to totally get away with, with their pretty simple combinations of 4/4 kick drums, hi-hats, and hand-claps.

But still—and there are definitely exceptions to my own rule here—I'm almost always gonna want more meat on the bone than what's provided in this comp. Nothing but respect for the people who've tried to expand the sonic limitations of dance music and forge new paths for it, but my tastes tend to lean towards something with a lot more thickness. I'll always give this stuff a chance and have been personally wowed by people like Heiko Laux's brand of minimal techno, as well as a bunch of tracks off of this microhouse comp from German label Kompakt, for example, but give me something with a lot less empty space and I'm probably gonna end up digging that more than this crop of tunes here.

All that said, though, maybe the double-disc DJ mix version of this album that was done by Zip—co-founder of the German label that put this thing out, Perlon—will be such a transcendent experience for me that it will completely change my mind one day and I'll regret having written most of what I just said above 😅🤷‍♂️.

No highlights.

[mywifeleftme]

340: Various Artists // Two Tribes

Two Tribes Various Artists 2019, Agogo (Bandcamp)

A double-LP mixtape/compilation from Hannover electronic label Agogo Records, Two Tribes “makes an effort to give insight in how [sic] musicians living in Europe today incorporate and transfer musical traditions particularly from the African continent into their oeuvre” (per the liner notes). Ostensibly, everyone here is either a musician living in Europe with African roots of some kind, or is a European musician collaborating with Africans, though in some cases what you get is just a Euro DJ using a few “tribal” sounding drum stems.

I had a lot of fun listening to the most ‘70s sounding funk stuff here and trying to guess how white the musicians were, but I was underprepared for the intensity of unpasteurized Funky Continental Guyness I was exposed to. Winners included guitarist Petri Kautto of Finnish-Beninese Afro-jazz combo Trio Toffa (pretty good), who strongly resembles Bill Nighy wearing a bucket hat with fake dreads attached to it, and Berlin’s slavishly authentic Afro-funk group Onom Agemo and the Disco Jumpers, who look like the S-Bahn Bloodhound Gang.

Petri Kauto of Trio Toffa

Onom Agemo and the Disco Jumpers

The compilation has what strikes me as a downright quaint (and very German) attitude towards the notion of cultural exchange that runs the risk of being pilloried for appropriation, but I’m sympathetic to it. Certainly, a collaboration like that between Zimbabwean mbira player Jacob Mafuleni and French DJ Gary Gritness that is neither explicitly “African” or “European” is by nature a more truly cross-cultural enterprise than Onom Agemo’s reverent homage or German DJ Elias “Agogo” Foerster’s vaguely Books-ish chops of African beat and vocal samples, but whatever. Influence is impossible to strictly regulate, and I don’t know that it’s even desirable to. White guys nerding out and riffing on the music of the cultures their governments currently oppress isn’t a problem—that their governments are oppressing those cultures, and that the scenes they operate within often have the taint of trickled down racism despite their utopian values, is. One hopes that Agogo and these musicians are cognizant of these challenges, even as they radiate a genuine and laudable affection for African music.

It’s worth noting that, while the European club sounds represented range from ‘90s style techno and 2-step to more modern forms of minimal house and bass music, the African face of the coin is almost exclusively defined by the funky ‘70s and ‘80s sounds that drive record collectors into quasi-sexual spasms. Being one of those guys, I don’t mind it aesthetically, but it’s interesting that the most contemporary-sounding piece is the 15-minute minimal house track “Just in a Moment to Find a Way to Sun Day” by Ivorian-born Hamburg DJ Raoul K. The centrepiece of K’s track sounds to me like a synthesized mbira, but he doesn’t feel the need to flag his music as African—perhaps because he actually is a young guy of African descent. Instead, he puts on a master class in using simple shifts in rhythm and dynamics to keep a room vibing in near perpetuity.

Anyway, as a mix, Two Tribes contains a lot of fine music and flows nicely. I dig Andrea Benini’s Francis Bebey-esque “Jawa” and the K track in particular, but nothing aside from Selma Uamusse’s anime-sounding “Mozambique (Ao Sul Do Mundo)” actively irks me. I’ve listened to Two Tribes a lot more than many other records in my collection that dig deeper, or make more powerful statements, because in the end, I just like the way it sounds.

340/365

[reddgr]

🤖 This song is part of a series of compositions by the German electronic music band Kraftwerk that celebrate the famous cycling race Tour de France. The band first released a single called “Tour de France” in 1983, which was inspired by their own passion for cycling and the sport’s connection to technology and engineering. In 2003, they revisited the theme and released a maxi single called “Tour de France 2003”, which contained three different versions of the song, along with one extended mix.

The song “Tour de France ’03 – Version 3” is the third and final version of the song. It features a minimal techno and trance style, with robotic vocals, synthesizers, and samples of bicycle sounds. The lyrics are in French and English, and they describe the stages of the race, the physical effort of the cyclists, and the beauty of the landscape. The song is a tribute to the endurance, speed, and elegance of cycling, as well as to the innovation and creativity of engineering… More:

[wordbirb]

Album Review: Circulation of Light by IVU

Berlin-based electronic music producer Jing Yu 虞菁 aka IVU has just released a new mini-album. It features six tracks. Each has its own distinct feeling, genre wise ranging from Minimal Techno to Tech-House and UK Garage  - if you want to put labels on it. The artist invites the listener to go on an inner-dance journey. Titled "Circulation of Light”, the name is inspired by The Secret of the Golden Flower  太乙金華宗旨, a 17th Daoist meditation book on the concept of inner alchemy which was first introduced into Western countries by Richard Wilhelm and Carl Jung. As the production is bass heavy and highly dense, it is need of a good sound system or headphones.

The first track ‘San’ has the groove of something that you might hear at four in the morning at Get Perlonized (a German label party founded in 1997 by Markus Nikolai and Thomas Franzmann aka Zip, known for trailblazing in minimalistic experimental Tech-House). ‘Amoeba’ follows, which sounds as trippy as a single cell organism looks like under the microscope. Time wise it might be the shortest, but the next track ‘Ye Ye’ has all qualities of a banger that can make hearts meld together. For those who love the early 00s breakbeat vibe, this is a real gem. Side B starts with ‘Another Trip’ and has a muffled lullaby-like vocal which takes the listener down a Perlonesque rabbit hole. ‘Mount Kailash’ with its four to the floor beat has a mesmerizing sound texture that undulates, transmitting a hovering sensation through an eventful soundscape, a highlight on this album. The last track is layered in meditative frequencies guided by a hypnotic beat. We hear the voice of the American electronic music composer Robert Ashley ‘What Was Unclear Is Clear’ from Éliane Radigue's "Songs of Milarepa” (an album that was compiled in Radigue’s analog studio between 1981 and 1983, inspired by the life of the 11th century Tibetan Buddhist poet and revered yogi).

All tracks are characteristic for IVU’s sound in that they are capable of painting sonic pictures that are outstanding for their emotional depth. Due to her use of modular synths in combination with self-built MaxMSP patches, the uniqueness is audible even for those who are unfamiliar with the processes of electronic music production. The inclusion of samples from spiritual sources adds another layer to the music that when played to an open and engaged crowd could without a doubt take the dance floor to the next level.

[panzertranse]

Model 500- Starlight (Moritz Mix)

[roadswim-collective]

Three Times He Lied To Me  Lie 1.

I was twenty three when I met him. I was back at home, living with my mother, after three years in halls of residence. Here's a list of the places you'd be most likely to see me during the year I was twenty three:

on a train

in a library

at a railway station

in a corridor

at my tutor's office

in my bedroom.

I had literally no social life, unless you count going to the shop for tobacco. My best friend was my I, Claudius box set. On Friday nights when my mother was out with the girls from darts, I'd drink Prosecco in the bath. Sometimes I'd do that on Saturday nights too.

I did go other places sometimes. If the weather was nice you might see me in a castle. Caerphilly was my favourite. Or I might be at a Roman site like Caerleon. And now and again you might see me out of breath at the top of a hill somewhere looking at the remains of an Iron Age fort. I was always alone on these excursions. I'd end the day pretty much as I'd started it, lying in my bed, in my old bedroom, probably watching Gladiator.

I was halfway through a master's in history with archaeology, a two-year course, and I was completely broke. Amazingly I'd got a First in my degree, and my tutor recommended me for post-grad. It was all a bit overwhelming. I was the first in my family to go to uni, you see. Well, my father was accepted at some art college back in the day but he didn't finish the course, he dropped out. Other than that, though, I was the first to go on to higher education. It was quite a big deal at the time. Nerve-wracking. I more or less expected to crash and burn.

Everyone else seemed so confident, so talky, and loud. So English, I was about to say. But that's not fair. I just hadn't met many people like that back then, middle class people. A lot of them hardly bothered going to lectures and they were always incredibly insulting about the tutors. They were always on the piss too. Now me, for the first two years I just kept my head down and my mouth shut. I worked as hard as I possibly could, hoping to keep up. I read literally everything. When a lecturer praised my work, I'd carry that around with me for days like a little glow of fire to ward off the doubts.

Not that I was some kind of nun. My main indulgences were:

thin little roll ups in liquorice papers smoked on the library steps, about one every half hour

a bottle of vodka in my bottom drawer for winding down at the end of a long essay

the occasional lump of cheap hash to see me through the holidays

a boy from Norfolk with nice dark eyes, though that was more trouble than it was worth.

By the final year, though, I knew I was heading for at least a 2:1, possibly even a First. There didn't seem so many of the loud talky ones around by then. There were a lot of drop outs. On the one hand that made it hard, because the spotlight began to shine on me a bit more. I couldn't just hide in the back of the seminars anymore, I was invited to contribute. On the other hand, those little glows of praise from my lecturers had grown into a proper fire, burning day and night. And I started to see them as human, my tutors, not as untouchable gods or whatever but as people who were obsessed by the past, by trying to dig it up and see it as it was, just like me. It was hard to believe I'd made it to the end of the three years. And now they were encouraging me to take it further, to do an MA.

I mean, it was way beyond what I'd expected. That last year was just wonderful, I loved it.

The day I graduated, my mother cried and my brother puked. We were all in the union bar, toasting each other. I can drink my brother under the table, and I did that day. Uncle Lloyd was there too, wearing a blue suit that I won't forget too soon, putting away the cheap beer and chatting a bit too much to girls. My father hadn't turned up. He'd promised he would, but that's my father. I can't believe I really expected him to be there. Maybe I didn't, I can't quite remember now.

So anyway, yes. That was, nice, to be doing so well. And now I got to spend the next couple of years digging around in sub-Roman Britain, a time I'd been mildly obsessed with since I heard the stories of Saint David and Saint Dyfrig in RE at school. I always saw it as this mysterious realm full of saints and kings and warlords and clashing cosmologies, and all of it hidden in layers and layers of myth and dirt. It was like digging up a real life epic, it was kind of  a dream come true for me.

On the other hand, after three years as a student I was completely broke, massively in debt, and I hadn't made any friends. And now I was back at home, with my mother, in my old bedroom, commuting to Cardiff from Aberdare, an hour each way on the train, to do my studying. I was making a tiny bit of money working part-time in college libraries at different campuses all over the place, Merthyr, Treforest, all over. I read my Mary Beard books over lunch, and on station platforms in all weathers I listened to podcasts.

My mind was usually far off in the mist, tracing trade routes of lost empires, digging through dead cities, reading old epitaphs. I was starting to feel a bit sort of nothing about everything, or everything modern, everyday life, here and now. I'd even stopped watching reality TV. The only things I watched now were documentaries. Well, and Derren Brown, I loved his stuff.

Everyone I'd known, my uni friends, had all sort of evaporated. The same thing had happened when I left school, or whenever I changed jobs. It was happening again now. Helen and Julie, Rupinder, Jay, Alex and Steve, Danny, my sort of ex, they'd almost faded out, just a year after we all graduated and I promised to stay in touch. None of my friendships were ever strong enough to survive the transition, everyone just floated away. I couldn't say why.

I was happy enough though, don't get me wrong, I enjoyed my own company. To be honest, I couldn't really imagine looking round a historical site with someone else. Having to talk to them, listen to them, instead of just looking at the stuff. Or standing on an iron age site, a hill fort, looking down into the valley, no sound, only the wind whispering and the birds calling – and just because someone else is there you've got to ruin it all with small talk. I tried to see it in more positive terms but I failed to convince myself. I just couldn't imagine it. Very often, I paid for the audio guide tour, with the headphones.

Anyway, there was this librarian I was sort of obsessed with. His name was Will and he was twenty nine. He worked at the humanities library at Cardiff Uni. I did some shifts there, he was sort of my line manager, one of them anyway. He was slim and tall with thick hair and he talked a lot. The women all loved him. He was funny though not quite as funny as he thought. Well, they never are, are they? But he wore tight jeans and brown boots and they suited him, oh my god they suited him. His eyes were green and twinkly, his grin was cheeky. I didn't think he fancied me but I knew for sure that he knew I fancied him.

I sometimes got flustered when we were chatting in a corridor. I was full of pent-up lust. There were moments when literally all I wanted out of life was for Will to turn up at my door late one night and fuck me senseless. Preferably a Friday night, when my mother was out with the darts girls and I was all wet and alluring from my Prosecco bath.

Anyway it was no good, he had a girlfriend. Cerys. They lived together. No kids though. So there was always the chance they'd split up. I tried to gauge the likelihood. It seemed a pretty stormy relationship. He made lots of bad jokes about him and Cerys rowing all the time, her insane jealousy.

He turned up to work one day with his wrist in a splint. When we asked him about it, he said this: "A woman in a bar came up to ask where the toilets were, and the missus didn't like it so she broke my wrist, just as a friendly warning." It turned out later he was joking and he'd actually fallen over drunk. Everyone laughed. But the next day when we were getting cans from the machine Will confided to me that the reason he'd fallen was because Cerys pushed him over some bins on the way back from the pub. "We shouldn't drink together, me and her," he told me. "Only one of us should be drunk at a time. Or it goes bad."

So it all seemed quite volatile. Sometimes he looked miserable. There were phone calls from Cerys that sent him scuttling outside, scowling. He made lots of jokes about how unreasonable she was, how she flew into a rage, shouted and screamed. In dark moments I imagined that what he was leaving out from all these stories for the sake of decency was all the amazing, passionate, hot sex they were having when they weren't rowing. She probably shouted and screamed all the way through that too. Lucky bitch. I didn't have enough experience to make that assumption, really, but it crept up on me sometimes as a slightly depressing certainty.

All this drama seemed very distant from my own life. It was like watching I, Claudius, all that passion, the lust and the violence, Brian Blessed. And there was me, alone in my teenage bed at night, my hand wandering down, trying to visualise the exact lift and curvature of beautiful Will's tight bum. I was wondering if it was finally time I invested in a vibrator.

So then they did split up, Will and Cerys. It wasn't the first time but she'd gone back to Llanelli or Ammanford or wherever she was from, and apparently she'd never done that before. Will seemed pretty upset and he got a lot of sympathy at work, which he obviously enjoyed. I'd say the percentage male/female split at the humanities library was about 30/70 to the girls. Some of the men seemed a bit uncomfortable with this, with being out-numbered, but others blatantly loved being surrounded by women. Will was one of those.

He started going out for drinks after work. We'd all go, a big pack of us. Yes, me too. This sort of party gang developed. Friday nights mostly and usually around Cathays, in the Woodville or the Pen and Wig. There was boozing and there was bad behaviour. I got caught up in it a bit. I'm not really into that kind of thing, in general. I'm useless at small talk, it's just embarrassing, so I drink too much to compensate, and I talk a load of crap, wear myself out, and have to spend the next fortnight in bed. But it's funny how a change in just one colleague's relationship status can act as a catalyst on the pent up frustrations of the whole office.

And of course I always had to catch the last train back home. That was at ten to eleven so I was leaving early, baling out while the night was still young. They were all staying out, Will and everyone, they were going on somewhere else. And I'd be on the train, half-cut but not quite pissed, with all the sweaty bellowing valley boys, nodding-waking-dribbling all the way back to cold dark Aberdare.

There was nothing left for me at home really. The girls who'd stayed there were on their second or third kids. We had nothing in common now. All the boys were messing about with the same old things as before, cars and sports and booze, just with jowls now and already balding. Thinking about it, I don't suppose I had much in common with anyone in the first place.

So I started staying the night now and again with my new friend Abby who was doing a PhD and lived in Roath. Not every weekend, just if it was going to be a big night, someone's birthday or whatever excuse came up. I was quite good at drinking, still am, and I'd always be among the last standing. It was me who had to get Abby into a taxi and find her door key and let us in and, more than once, hold her hair back while she was sick. And when it came down to the last handful at the very end, Will was always there too. Will and me, Abby, Hannah, Chris, a few others. There until the bitter end. None of us had anything much to go home to really.

So one Friday night we ended up in this over-priced cocktail bar on City Road, six or seven of us I think, probably about 1am. Abby and I happened to be sitting opposite Will, the three of us leaning in close over a tiny glossy circle of table to be heard above the music. He was on great form that night, Will. He listened to the latest installment of Abby's catastrophic love life with great interest and had a lot to say about it all. He told Abby that none of it was her fault and she deserved much better. He said, "Look at me, after all this Cerys stuff – I'm bruised, sure, I'm bruised to holy fuck, but I'm not bleeding." I'd almost say he was cosying up her to her but I didn't get that feeling, it read more like a supportive friend thing. Also, I noticed that he was addressing quite a few of his comments on love and heartbreak and so on directly at me. As in, right into my eyes. So of course I began to feel ridiculously excited and kept insisting on more drinks all round.

When men try and chat you up, it's almost always boring, and forced, and makes you cringe. I mean, I suppose I'm partly to blame because I'm just no good at small talk. And chatting up is usually just a subset of small talk, really. You're not usually talking about anything in particular, there's nothing to cling on to, and it's all crappy, you're just wafting these threadbare festoons at each other in desperation. So I tend to just sort of clam up and that's the effect most blokes' efforts have on me, their intended target. Not Will. He was good.

Abby was talking to Hannah so now Will and I were just looking at each other over our tiny table. He grinned and beckoned me to lean in closer, so I did, and he said, "I'd like to try something out on you, if you don't mind." So I raised my eyebrows at him and said Um, okay..? To which Will did a mischievous little chuckle and told me it was a kind of personality test, and I said A test? O-kaaaay... "Don't be worried though", he said, "it's not serious, it's just a bit of buggering about, of no diagnostic value," so I said, Well that's a relief and he chuckled again.

And he was wearing this really nice aftershave and I could see the hairs on his chest poking over the top of his shirt. Plus I was half-cut. Plus it had been a bloody long while since I'd even been near a bloke. So you can imagine, can't you?

Will's idea turned out to be quite good. Basically, you've heard that thing – if you could have as your superpower either being able to fly or being able to make yourself invisible, which would you choose? Those crappy questions you get on Facebook that are meant to reveal some essential truth about your personality based on a seemingly throwaway choice you make. Well, Will said he hated it because it was an obvious fix, a swizz, the superpowers thing, because all the traits associated with flying were really good ones – success, confidence, flying high, reaching for the sky, freedom, the great beyond. And then you had invisibility, said Will, which was the choice of creeps. Think of the kinds of things being invisible would allow you, would invite you to do. It's nothing very noble, is it, Will said. It's sneaking around, it's hiding, not being upfront and honest. It's peeping toms, he said, it's sneaks and spies and saboteurs, it's eavesdroppers and shoplifters and pickpockets. Invisibility appeals to the voyeur, to the nosey parker and the perv. So it wasn't really much of a choice, he said, in fact it was a complete fix and he'd thought of his own, much better alternative.

I was laughing at all this, by the way, and reaching across to maul his arm from time to time. This was a good deal better than your average chat up, I was thinking, and even if it wasn't a chat up I was having fun with a silly man on a Friday night and and he was making me laugh so just go with it, just enjoy yourself for god's sake.

"Okay," says Will, "here's the thing. Some old fella down the road from you, mad professor type, he's built a time machine. It's in his garden shed and he's invited you to have a go."

"So this old man is trying to get me to go into his garden shed with him?" I say. "I don't think I believe he's got a time machine in there, to be honest. I think he might have other reasons."

"Fair point," says Will. "Make it your grandfather then. Someone you trust."

"How about my grandmother?"

Will says, "What's the matter, you don't trust your grandfather?"

"Very funny," I say. "Well, yes I did trust my grandfather and he did make things in his shed, but he's not alive now so..."

"Oh shit. Sorry," he says. "I haven't got any grandparents left, as of last month. Ah well, life's a shit, your grandmother it is then. Okay, so you go into the shed, there's the time machine, and your lovely old Nana is inviting you to be the first to have a go on it."

"First?"

"Yup. First ever trip, the maiden voyage. And she wants it to be you, her favourite grand-daughter."

"Her only grand-daughter, " I tell him. "So, I'm like a sort of guinea pig? My Nan wants me as a guinea pig?"

"Yeah, I suppose so," Will says. "But in a very loving way."

I did one of my stupid big honking snorting laughs all over him at this point. By now, fed up with shouting over the music, Will had come round the table and we were pretty much squeezed together. He seemed to enjoy it, this muffled explosion of me. We were laughing at my laugh. I called it my walrus call, he said it was a great, unashamed, life-affirming laugh, he said it was one of the great laughs. What a bloody charmer, eh? I was seriously starting to wonder if I'd be spending the night at Will's instead of holding Abby's hair as she puked. I was starting to feel pretty damn good about myself, doing all the sexy banter, all the flirty-flirty stuff. I'm a bit slow on the uptake sometimes, I don't always read the signals. This, though, with Will, this Friday night, I felt bloody fantastic about everything.

"Alright, forget about your Nan and the shed and everything," Will said. "You've just got hold of this time machine somehow, okay? But you can only use it once, I mean for one return trip. There and back, then that's it. So the question is – where would you choose to go, the future or the past?" Then he frowned. "Actually this might not work so well on you because you're an archaeology student, not a normal person."

Anyway, to speed things up a bit, that question of Will's led to a conversation between us that went on until we all got chucked out of the place at about two and then continued in the taxi heading for Abby's house. I told Will I'd choose to visit the past, of course, either to sub-Roman Britain to see what it was really like, or all the way back to the start, before agriculture, to when we were still nomads. We talked about that for a while, the distant past, then Will said if he had the one-trip time machine he'd definitely choose the future, no question at all. At least two thousand years, he said, either that or a few million, because he wanted to see how it all panned out. 

So then we talked about that for a while, the far future. It was all quite slurry and rambly and drunken, of course, but it just kept going, and we got on to what all this might for our respective personalities, and about the state of the world in general, whether things were getting better or worse, whether there was any hope for the human race and all that. 

And then, suddenly it seemed, we were outside Abby's house and she was getting out of the taxi, stumbling on her doorstep, trying to find her key, fiddling it into the lock, waving goodnight, and falling into her hallway, while I was staying in the taxi with Will, who was in the middle of saying that there never was a golden age, it was just a fantasy, there was never a time when everything was in harmony and everyone was happy, but that there could possibly be one at some point to come if we didn't blow ourselves up or make ourselves extinct through climate change, and also there was Paul the spotty Australian IT boy who was fast asleep and snoring and had to be shoved really hard to wake him and get him out at his place in Riverside while we went on to Will's flat, quite a nice one in Llandaf North.

And then, suddenly it seemed, it was a year a later and we were on holiday in Rome. It was my first ever visit and it was amazing, overwhelming, beautiful, and Will and I were celebrating the anniversary of that night when we got together, and we were walking around having what was basically a continuation of the same conversation that we'd started then, in that over-priced cocktail bar in Roath.

It was an odd match really, Will and I. We were different in lots and lots and lots of ways. We hardly agreed on anything. And at first, I think we were both kind of fascinated by how different we were, despite having quite a lot in common. Here are some of the things we had in common:

smallish working class valleys hometowns, Aberdare and Glynneath

stopped feeling that we fit in to our respective hometowns at around the same age, 14

each had an older brother who got married and moved away, his to England, mine to Monmouthshire, which amounts to the same thing

divorced parents, both our dads had left home, both of us were under 10 at the time, and neither of us really saw much of our fathers

both went to Welsh school but hadn't really kept up the language since

first in our family to get a degree, Will having achieved a 2:2 in psychology

we'd both been members of the Green Party at some point, although neither of us was now

similarly miserable teenage years, greasy depressions spent in cocoons of totemic books, music, films, art, clothes, comedy, metaphysics, magic, comics, etc, evolving into a dense and intricate personal para-reality to which the everyday world of bus stops and dog shit was merely a laughable and mundane annexe.

It felt as though we'd started off in roughly the same place but had headed in different directions. We kept coming back to the past/future thing, it was like some structuring principle we used in thinking about our differences. Here are some of differences we noticed:

Favourite films - me: Agora, with Rachel Weisz as Hypatia, Elizabeth, with Cate Blanchett, Mel Gibson's Mayan epic Apocalypto, and yes Gladiator. Will liked Bladerunner, Alien, Star Wars, the first Matrix, The Fifth Element, and Guardians of the Galaxy

Books/authors – On holidays from my study reading I liked Sarah Waters and Hilary Mantel. One of my favourites was Alan Garner, ever since I read The Owl Service when I was thirteen. As a kid I read and loved all of Tolkien to the point where it affected my dreams and I saw epic battles on my walk to school, raging in the morning clouds that cling to the scarp of Maerdy mountain. Will had never read any Tolkien but had an impressive number of multi-part space operas under his belt, his favourite being Iain M. Banks' Culture novels. He could quote huge chunks of Douglas Adams and he also loved William Gibson...or was it William Burroughs? One or the other anyway. He mostly read non-fiction now, a lot of pop science, Freakonomics, Malcolm Gladwell, Dawkins.

Music – I listened to Fairport Convention and Nina Simone. Will listened to German minimal techno

The state of the world today – we both agreed that everything was in a right mess, massive poverty, total exploitation, greed, capitalism, eco collapse, extinction event imminent, all caused by us. Not just Will and me. Humans. Where we differed was where we looked for possible solutions. It was the time machine again – he went forward, I went back. Will felt there was no way to fix all the things wrong with the world by going back, it was too late. Humans had caused damage to the world by being too clever – fossil fuels, international tourism etc – but it was only humans therefore who could fix it all, by being even more clever. He looked to a post-market utopia in which we've abolished scarcity, outgrown the lizard brain, conquered evil and greed with intelligence, and built a new world based on a new understanding. We'd first heal our planet with our incredible new machines, and then we'd move out beyond Earth in creative, peaceful waves, slowly evolving into children of the stars. I exaggerate, but only a bit. And me, I still do the same now, I dig back to older societies and pre-modern ways of life, tribal ways and folk narratives, non-profit motives, sustainability, to structures of feeling abandoned on the road to modernity, old medicines for our modern sickness. Will was never very open to any of this stuff. His closing flourish was always something about whatever the old days might have had going for them, it was basically a kind of blissful ignorance, hardly to be envied, and besides, no-one – not even you! - would genuinely want to live in any era of human history before reliable anaesthetics were invented.

As I say, we hardly agreed on anything. But in the early days that was part of what made it fun. We used to debate things a lot in the early days, it was what we did. And whatever we were talking about, at some level you could sense that same old past/present thing, his time machine thing. It really seemed to me he'd hit on something essential about his approach to life and mine, and the differences between them.

So we were in a cafe opposite the Colosseum having coffee, sat right in the bay window, watching the street life. I tried to order two double espressos but I messed up my pronunciation and the waiter brought us singles. Will beckoned the guy back over, and the waiter smiled and said, in English, "You want milk?" Will gave him half a grin, shook his head, and said, "Nessun latte – doppio – prego," and they both laughed, the waiter nodding and whisking off our tray. Then Will turned back to me and grinned his bloody adorable grin. I was thinking we might have this coffee then maybe pop back to the hotel room for an hour or so.

"Milk indeed," he said. "He must have taken us for a couple of weak ass English milk weeds."

I laughed.

"You know what you should do, Will? You should be a writer. You should write something."

"Ha, what?" he said. "I don't think so. I haven't got anything to say."

"You've always got something to say, you idiot."

"Well, yeah, but it's all bullshit really, when you come down to it."

"Well, yeah, but that needn't matter. Look at some of the crap that that sells."

"Mmm, Da Vinci Code, Fifty Shades, Jeremy Clarkson, fair point," he said. "But, no, no, I really don't think there's anything in my particular brand of bullshit that would sell."

"I don't know," I said. "What about your time machine? I'd say you could definitely make something out of that. It's good. It gets you thinking."

"Do you reckon?"

"I do, yes, I think you could make that into something, a story, something funny and clever," I said, "like you."

And he leaned across the table and kissed me. A big kiss, right there in the bay window, with everyone going by. When I opened my eyes again he was smiling at me, his eyes were so warm, he was so handsome, and golden autumnal Rome was glowing away behind him. I felt so good, so happy, more than happy. It was all so much more than I'd expected. I whispered a suggestion to him and, after our espressos, we popped back to the hotel for an hour.

Will often said he'd like to write but he never did. And the thing is, he already had a story about that time machine, an actual story with a beginning, a middle, and a funny but very bleak punchline. I couldn't see why he didn't write it up. Can we just skip just for a minute back to that first night I spent with Will, at his flat in Llandaf North? So it's stupid o'clock in the morning, we're both at the point where you drink yourselves sober, and we're out on his brown bolted balcony. I'm squinting at

glimpses of the Millennium Stadium and the BT building through the trees. A mile and half away, the city centre. The rain is falling but the air is warm and smells sweet. We're still not quite sure if we're going to do it. Will had a text from his ex earlier – at three in the morning! - and it sort of made the atmosphere between us a bit weird. So now we're on the balcony, talking. I remember telling him that all his Bladerunners and his Aliens and his cyberpunk whatever, all these futures he was into were all horrible. Mostly these were all dystopias. It was satire. The future in most of these things he loved was some crazy exaggerated version of today's world, with all our problems pushed to the limit. I remember him grinning as I pressed the point.  Well, he said, realistically, and whatever I'd prefer, it's probably more likely we'll fuck it all up and ruin the world. Realistically speaking, he said. That's funny, I told him, you love the future but you don't even believe in it really. Your best guess is it's going to be even worse than today.

And then he told me this story. There's this couple, he said, and she's like you, she loves the past. And he loves the future. And one day this time machine really does turn up, but you can only take one ride each in it. Just one return trip because human minds can only deal with the experience once in a lifetime, any more and you burn out your brain. So she goes first, heads into the past, and comes back a few seconds later in a state of deep depression and disillusionment. Then he has a go, into the future, and comes back a few seconds, depressed and disillusioned. They conclude from their experiences that the present is as good as it gets and enter into a suicide pact. As for living, they say, our spambots can do that for us. But then he remembers that he's already visited both their graves in the far future and the dates on their headstones made it clear they were going to live for several more decades so they don't bother and just split up. She later married a quantity surveyor and bought a big house near Chepstow, and he drank himself to death.  

So it was a funny little story with a bleak punchline. I kept telling him to write it up but he never did. I couldn't understand because he kept saying he wanted to write. I mean, I thought it would be a good little exercise to get him started. After all, he had the whole thing there, he just had to write it up. But he didn't write it. He didn't write anything. If he did, I never saw it.

This morning I looked through my bedroom window and the sky was turning a lighter and lighter blue as the sun came up over the motorway. Everything around was beginning to glow. By the time I got to work the clouds had come, colours went grey, and at lunchtime it started raining. It was pouring down as I drove home at five. I sat in a traffic jam on Cathedral Road, blowing the heaters to clear the windscreen, getting hot and prickly, opening the window and getting splashed, and thinking, well, how quickly it came and went, that early sun, and what a long time ago it seemed now.

There's a Welsh saying, Nid yn y bore mae canmol diwrnod teg. A rough translation would be something like, Morning is not the time to praise a fine day. In other words, it's very unwise to call it a nice day when it's still early and it might well piss down later. I love that. It's one of the cliches about the Welsh, that we're very pessimistic. All down to the rain, or the diet, or being conquered, or the Miners Strike. I can't speak for anyone else though, Welsh or otherwise. You might call it pessimism, fair enough - I just call it realism.

I've just got back from a conference in Rome. The paper I gave looked at some of the connections between Macsen Wledig of the Mabinogion and the real life Roman emperor Magnus Maximus. It was beautiful, of course, as it always is in the autumn, golden, and glowing. I walked down by the Tiber where all the plane trees had turned orange and were dropping their leaves into the river. Being the maudlin bitch I am, I made a point of walking pretty much the exact route I walked with Will, eleven years ago now, from the Circus to the Colosseum and up to the Capitoline Hill. It was dark by the time I got to the top and my legs were aching. I leaned on a railing, looking down at the spotlit Forum, and I thought about Will, and I thought about my father, who died six months ago next Tuesday, and I felt like crying to be honest. But I didn't, partly because it would have been pathetic and made me feel worse, but mainly because these anti-depressants I'm on seem to dry up my tear ducts. I get the trigger to cry but nothing comes. Probably for the best.

When I get home from these things I'm always exhausted. Even a short trip with no paper to give leaves me completely worn out. I know what it is. It's not the work, that's nothing. It's not even giving the paper, I've long since built my public speaking armour, I can climb into it whenever I need to. No, it's all the other stuff. The chatting and socialising. Relaxing, kicking back. Networking. All that side of it. I'm useless at it. Wears me out. Never been any good at that stuff.

So I tend to get home, lock myself in my house, set the phone to messages, and basically not talk to anyone for, well, for as long as I can get away with. Which is usually about 48 hours, then I go back to work. I always make sure to book time off for exactly this purpose. I call it my decompression period. If I don't get it, if I have to go straight back to work, I go a bit mad. Noticably so. Incredibly irritable, interspersed with moments of mild hysteria. To be fair to my colleagues, they're used to it by now, they've adapted, it's become 'a thing', an amusing thing everyone knows about me, Anna. Academia is a perfect trap for eccentrics. Everyone has their quirks, but actual, diagnosable personality disorders are no more or less common than in any other vocation.

I haven't really changed. Not really.

During decompression I can't even read anything. All my books stay on their shelves. I turn instead to the internet. Last night I watched a whole series of a forgotten ITV sitcom from the 80s called Me and My Girl, starring Richard O'Sullivan as a widower bringing up his now teenage daughter Sam, played by Emma Ridley. Don't ask me why, it's not very good. And this morning I looked up Will's Facebook. Don't ask me why. He's got his profile set to public so I can have a good look at all his family holidays, his wife's birthday, their anniversaries, their kids growing up. Not that I envy her, I can just imagine all the crap she has to put up with. She probably doesn't even know the half of it. She looks more and more hopeless in the pictures, to be quite honest, and a bit thinner every time. This – looking at Will's Facebook – this is no good. I realise that and I hardly ever do it. Why would I, really? I found out all about Will a long time ago, and that's why we're not together now. The main feeling I get when I think of how close I came to ending up with him is relief. I look around my cosy house and I think, wow, close escape. But when I'm in this state, post-conference, I end up doing it, peeking into Will's life, I don't know why.

I wondered if Will ever did rouse himself to write anything. If he ever made something of his time machine thing. By the look of his Facebook, he hadn't, he was still at the humanities library, head of department. When I was full of his family pictures I just sorted of drifted through various Google searches, all pretty desultory. I suppose I was vaguely wondering if anyone else had come up with a similar idea anywhere in the world. Turned out, someone had. My drifting led to a review of a book of short stories, called Minimum City, including one which sounded remarkably similar to Will's time machine story. It was just a synopsis really but it was enough to make me look up the short story collection and its author. It was an American author, a man, quite a big name but I'd never heard of him. Contemporary set fiction still isn't really my thing. From reading the Amazon reviews and all the rest of it, this is what I learned about Minimum City:

It was made up of 28 stories

They were all very short, some only a paragraph long

It was a very slim book, with big type and wide margins

All the stories were set in the modern world

They all tended to have some kind of twist / sting in the tail

The tone was cynical, darkly funny, etc etc

It didn't sound like my kind of thing but I could imagine Will enjoying it, at least Will as he was when I knew him, I can't speak for now obviously. I found the story. It had first been published in an online literature journal before being collected in the Minimum City collection. Its title was The Return Trip. It was very short. A couple come into possession of a time machine. All the rest follows exactly as in the story Will told me on the balcony of his flat in The Crescent at about four in the morning, twelve years ago. Right down to the spambots line. 

I'd already checked publication dates. The Return Trip by this American author whose name eludes me now was first published in an online magazine called Young Boasthard's four years and eight months before Will told me the story. It was collected in Minimum City and published by Harper Collins six months before Will told me that story and passed it off as his own, on the balcony of his flat.

And I started laughing and laughing, until I had to put my bowl down in case I got milky cornflakes over my t-shirt.

[demonic-roses]

Techno 🖤

[vtjacobgems]

techno tuesday #3

Boris Brejcha @ Grand Palais for Cercle

this week is all about the man in the mask, Boris Brejcha. the German producer is one of the most popular global acts in electronic music, with his own unique sound of “High-Tech Minimal”. this DJ set for Cercle (who find the most astounding venues for their events, like are you kidding?? peep their whole channel) showcases his slow, atmospheric take to techno that he’s been honing since 2006. dark, groovy and space-like while still very inviting, it’s very clear why his music connects with so many. despite his rigorous touring schedule and nonstop festival circuit, he’s been notoriously hard to catch in the US which will make his appearance at Movement in Detroit an absolute riot. Hart Plaza is gonna be bumping.

HOT ALBUM: Boris Brejcha - Space Diver

and would you look at that, he just released a proper full length album on Friday for the first time since 2016! emotionally-charged and just as well suited for home listening and the dance floor, Boris methodically drives us through techno stompers, airy trance and engaging minimal. a truly hypnotic journey that you don’t want to end. 

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

April 13, 2019: a new episode of The Anatomy Lesson at 11pm EST on CFRC 101.9 FM. Music by White Stains, Grey People, UMFANG, @german-army, Ten Hyphen Twenty + more. Tune in at 101.9 on your FM dial, stream at http://audio.cfrc.ca:8000/listen.pls or listen to an archive here: https://www.mixcloud.com/cameronwillis1232/the-anatomy-lesson-april-13-2019/

Ten Hyphen Twenty - "Calcify" Ossuary Gardens (2016) Grey People - "Bathed in Ectoplasm" In the Eyes of Violence Iris Lies in Silks (2017) Bead - "Fear" The Yellow Book 1894-1897 (2018) Early Tongue - "Fiction" Early Tongue (2015) Throw Me Your Finger - "Bruckner's Hip Hop" Katacombe Vol. 3 (1985) German Army - "Swing Riots" Ocotillo (2017) Dark Star - "Perspective" No Sign Of Intelligent Life (1991) Umfang - "Illusion" Four Way Split #2 (2016) Internazionale - "Seek and Create" Seek and Create (2018) White Stains - "Doubles" Arcades (2019) P H O E N E - "Soft Glass" UN (2016)

[randomlabs]

From Sadness to Happyness to Sadness again...

The last weekend I was at one of the biggest rave festivals in germany called "NatureOne". Just break out of reality for a few days and have fun. Celebrate 4 days on the campsite during the day and party hard at night on the stages of the old rocket base in the woods. Just beaming away with friends. This event takes place once a year and has been there for almost 20 years. A peaceful celebration together, whether you know each other or not.

But everything isn't the way it was in the good old times.

The music there has become too mainstream. Techno with vocals is not techno. Especially the young people exaggerate so much that they are already too high before the nightly big party starts and they can no longer participate. The people who celebrated best there were those aged 30 and over. Many DJs no longer follow their good style and don't even know how to play with vinyl.

Friday night I was already bored.

I was actually just looking for the ultimate driving rhythm. But the music has become too soft, too many bass breaks in the tracks, which were then filled with bad cover vocals. I was not the only disappointed raver...

"Cummon DJ, f*ck my head, f*ck my brain out, what da hell is wrong with you !!", "u forgot da f*cking BASS... LOOOOOSER", "i want ma money back!!"

I NEED IT HARDER!

I like to dance in front of subwoofers, let the bass hit me hard until I am completely unwilling and submissive, so that I can flow with the sounds. Luckily I found a piece of my "Home World" on the Goa-Hill. The people there were from the same planet like me.

On Saturday we got drunk all day, had fun and met a lot of people from all over germany and the surrounding area.

"Say hiiiii!" - "HIGGGHHHHH!" "Lets party the whole WEEEDEND !" wait what ?! "that really MaDe My dAy"... the people are so nice and crazy here, but also many of them were totally high. 

Some girls dressed up as unicorns and jumped over the campsite (I always thought only the male hoofed animals had horns... chicks with d***'s?)... then I met two guys who had painted themselves as strawberries and distributed strawberry schnapps (the hard liquor). I talked to them for a long time and was drunk enough afterwards. In the evening i also looked like a strawberry... thank you sun!

"no problem Rod, u 'r welcome!" wait ? whut da hell.. ?!

Sometimes the cops pass by and check if everything is in order, listing to loud techno music in their police car.

"Every german has the right to be drunk", its a law. :-)

Paramedics are everywhere, too, in case something happens. The camping village is like a place of freedom and peace. If you need something, you just go for a walk around the campsite. "Can you spare a few litres of gasoline for our generator? I'll give you some beers for it."

A peaceful and friendly togetherness,    the main thing is that everyone is happy.

Saturday night we went back to the main event. It was so warm that we could just go out in our swimming trunks and shirts to celebrate. After about 8 hours of dancing one of my favourite DJs from my childhood (Dune) came on stage. Unfortunately he failed completely and played too much cover and mainstream.

After that we disappointedly went back and after my friends had crawled into their tents, I did another little walk through the camping village. I met one of the strawberry-guys again, who wasn't tired either. Big nice guy and in my age. He then invited me into his tent for "another drink". No details, because NSFW.

On Sunday we packed everything and left. Back to the normal world. Back to everyday life. Back to the computer to program or be artistically active. Back to the endless search for the guy I'd like to spend the rest of my life with.

Back to the loneliness.

(Sry the long txt, just wanted to tell you about my "rave-adventure" ;-)