
Philipp Otterbach – Sonidos Subterraneos Episode 223



Max Schreiber is the more introspective guise of Mule Driver, reserved for drifting into fragile and haunted sonic territories. Variations on Memory Vol.2 deepens Schreiber’s exploration of collective sound and personal distortion. This time, fragments of lullabies and children’s songs resurface along side memorial songs – distorted by time, memory, and a quiet sense of unease. Schreiber treats these melodies not as sacred relics, but as raw material: vulnerable to noise, decay, and reinterpretation. Recorded in intuitive, often single-take sessions, the album challenges the listener’s sense of nostalgia. Sentimentality collapses into abstraction, and familiar tunes unravel into drifting soundscapes – like half-remembered scenes from a film that never existed. Variations on Memory Vol. 2 is less about what these songs once meant, and more about what they might conceal.

Mannequin Records presents Artificial Salvation, the long-awaited next chapter from Taiwan-born, Berlin-based artist Jing. A visceral journey into fragmented identity, post-human desire, and sonic disobedience, the album marks a bold evolution in Jing’s unmistakable language—where rhythm is weapon, voice is distortion, and silence is political. Known for her uncompromising DJ sets and past releases exploring industrial textures, field recordings, and haunting spoken word, Jing now delivers her most narrative-driven and confrontational work to date. Artificial Salvation lives at the intersection of club dystopia and spiritual unease: glitched-out techno structures collide with ghostly chants and collapsing machinery, echoing themes of surveillance, digital exile, and existential displacement. Crafted between Taipei and Berlin, the album draws from a palette both hyper-modern and deeply ancestral—melding broken beats, noise, and vocal manipulation into an unflinching statement of intent.

Composer and sound artist Ishai Adar unveils the original score for HBO’s Our Boys, now available digitally for the first time. The 2019 series dramatizes the harrowing events surrounding the 2014 abduction and murder of Palestinian teenager Mohammed Abu Khdeir in Jerusalem, offering an unflinching exploration of state power, communal trauma, and fractured identities. Adar’s score avoids conventional narrative cues, instead constructing a sonic architecture of electroacoustic dissonance and textural abstraction. The compositions conjure an imagined ensemble—acoustic instruments processed and mutated into something part-organic, part-synthetic, edged with overtones of drone and analog decay. The resulting sound captures a persistent sense of unease and interior tension, echoing the bleak interrogation rooms and shadowed urban landscapes that define the series.

Electronic music visionary Pye Corner Audio, a master of blending nostalgia with forward-thinking production, has carved out a unique niche in the electronic music landscape. Drawing inspiration from 1970s and 80s synthesizer music, Detroit techno, and cinematic soundtracks, his work often evokes a sense of eerie futurism. Lapsus Records present “Where Things Are Hollow: No Tomorrow”, a comprehensive box set revisiting and expanding his acclaimed Where Things Are Hollow series. This release includes the first two volumes – with volume 2 featuring an unreleased track – and two additional chapters that further enrich the series’ narrative. Once again, Pye Corner Audio delivers innovative soundscapes, drawing inspiration from ambient techno, cinematic electronica, and experimental slow disco. The third installment unveils a constellation of entirely new tracks, weaving the ambient, synthwave, and retro-futuristic textures that define Jenkins’ work. Meanwhile, Where Things Are Hollow 4 amplifies this narrative, incorporating reinterpretations by some of today’s most visionary artists: Alessandro Cortini, John Talabot, Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith, Lord Of The Isles and Surgeons Girl

‘Four Seasons in Kyoto’ marks the final chapter of The Kyoto Connection’s Ambient Japanese trilogy, following Postcards (2018) and The Flower, The Bird and The Mountain (2022). Like its predecessors, this album pays homage to the pioneering ambient and environmental music movements of 1980s and 1990s Japan. The album unfolds as the imagined soundtrack to life in a quiet rural village, where nature and tradition shape the rhythm of everyday existence. Across 15 evocative compositions, The Kyoto Connection captures the essence of Japan’s ever-changing seasons, weaving together delicate melodies and immersive soundscapes. With contributions from friends and fans in Japan, Four Seasons in Kyoto is both a tribute and a transportive listening experience from producer Facundo Arena, the composer and producer behind The Kyoto Connection.

‘Tornamented Walls’ is the first result of a collaboration that began in 2022. The album is a freeze-frame of emergence: personal preparations prior and minor aside, the album was live and improvised. Rosa Anschütz sings, speaks, plays harmonium, and utilizes a looper as an instrument in itself. Her symbolic prose is at the heart of the music, emotionally direct yet haunted by a translucent potential of meaning. In lockstep with the voice, Tennota dissolve the dense rhythmic complexity of their recent work into a creeping mantra, the material interrogated until the patina of the sound is the music itself. ‘Tornamented Walls’ floats on top of a wave of slow-motion techno influences, a deepened ambient and experimental perspective, and a feel of subtle and subdued lyricism not strictly limited to its vocal parts. It is a record of darkly ambient and abstracted techno pop, listening music to be played loud. More disenchanted than dark, it is confrontational through its fearless incorporation of a widely varying set of different states of mind.

Synthesizer folksongs full with nostalgia and yearning. Made on a rusty DX7 synthesizer & DexeD controller fed through various analog filters to warm it up a bit. Recorded 2024 & 2025 by Danny Wolfers & Dim Garden.

DYL presents a live-recorded set that embodies his experimental approach to sound design. By reprocessing stems from both completed and unfinished tracks through his modular system, he gives these pieces a renewed purpose and direction. The set offers a cohesive yet dynamic listening experience, reflecting DYL’s refined production techniques.

The story of “Inner | Outer” begins in 2015, when two members of Berlin bass combo X.A.Cute and Jerusalem’s psych grooves expert, Markey Funk, set up a spontaneous jam session in the basement of an ex-spring factory building. The outcome of that meeting – now known as “Aquasonic Research Society” (Som Recordings, 2020) – was so inspiring for the three that they determined to record again the next time Markey is in Berlin. Eventually, two more sessions took place in consecutive years at Oberbaumstübchen, overlooking river Spree, U-Bahn tracks and Universal Music headquarters. The change of location also led them to depart from the bubbling aquatic motives towards darker mesmerizing soundscapes that explore themes and mysteries of deep outer space and the human body (sometimes described as “inner space”).

Yarrow Ballet returns with a temperamental twelve track VA compilation traversing from moody experimental electronics to dark industrial sounds, post punk and gloomy synth wave.

Random Numbers continues its presentation of La Serpiente’s immersive output with Elaphe Dione: The first full-length album of the multifaceted producer and a matured imprint of his distinct sound. The record includes five tracks and a digital bonus exhibiting a sonorous marriage between post-industrial esotericism and club-ready psychedelia; A labyrinth of elaborate sound design coiling around sharp rhythms, adorned by fractured voices spawned in obscure worlds. With sensibility towards granular detailing amidst a powerful cascading flow, La Serpiente’s versatile sonic arrangements coalesce into music that always breathes – A drifting current of enchantment materializing as a release that is both ornamental and symbolic in its vision.

Sunfear returns to Dark Entries with ‘All at Once’, her sophomore LP. Sunfear is the project of Turkish multidisciplinary artist Eylül Deniz. Her music blends intense guitar feedback with layers of noise, creating vast, textured compositions and vocals that evoke a sense of both chaos and beauty. Since 2017, Sunfear has carved out a niche in the experimental music scene, using her guitar and her voice to explore the boundaries of sound and emotion. Her work often feels like a journey through dark, expansive sonic landscapes, reflecting her deep connection to the power of sound. Her aim is self-expressive; these experimental tactics are her narrative and worldbuilding tools. ‘All at Once’ shows Deniz deepening her connection to the guitar, her voice, and the Sunfear project as whole. All at Once is a darker album than its predecessor Octopus. ‘All at Once’ reflects the dark times we live in, but it does not only live in hopelessness; it recognizes that while loss and trauma may change our forms, we must continue to move forward.

Sweet Nectar Tapes is proud to present the label’s first LP: “Fool or Genious” by G. S. Ruessler. Nine hardsoft cuts combining stubborn grooves and naïve melodies form an uncompromisingly honest album. Pursuing a genuinely straight-to-the-point approach, the tracks were recorded live from desk without any overdubbing. This record marks the departure point of G. S. Ruessler’s explorations in the sonic realm.

Mystical sounds from the shadows of the night The Zurich duo The Nightstalker, consisting of producers Dan Piu and Popshop (Gary Rich), create a cosmos of sound that plunges deep into the darkness and unfolds an almost magical attraction. After two acclaimed albums on the Berlin label Childhood Intelligence, they now invite us on a sonic fantasy journey with their new mini-album ‘Isoutopic Fantasia’ on World Wide Web Records. With six tracks that oscillate between danceable darkness and playful, surreal moments, ‘Isoutopic Fantasia’ embodies a seductive fusion of mystical depth and bizarre beauty. The sounds are addictive and lead us through a musical dream realm where each beat reveals a new twist and the melodies unfold into sprawling, unexpected dimensions. A sonic fantasy carried by the shadows of the night, in which light and darkness unite in a hypnotic dance.

Heinrich Dressel presents Reflected Skies: a tribute to Dressel’s distinctive style of cinematic ambience. The scenery in Reflected Skies is not the protagonist but rather the details, that hint at a larger picture, like the sky as it appears in everyday reflections. Dark, expectant and mysterious where the listener is left to awe at the subtle questioning of an untold story.

Space Drum Meditation unveils ‘Four Tusks’, their debut album and seventh release on the label. This 12-track journey blends tribal rhythms, atmospheric textures, and electronic elements, interweaving darkness and light. The album un- folds like a ritual, revealing a murky, immersive soundscape shaped by primal beats, ethereal ambience, rumbling thunder, and the whisper of rain, reminiscent of a primeval marshland and drawing one into its depths. Featuring a wide array of instruments including deep percussion, traditional flutes, throat singing, and field recordings – Four Tusks crafts a mysterious tapestry that feels both ancient and futuristic, resonating with nature’s elements.

A deep dive into the raw, unfiltered experience of modern life, this album blends Ambient Noise Experimental with the relentless agony and struggle of societal pressure. Yet, through the chaos, a glimmer of freedom emerges—an unapologetic expression of self, breaking through the limits that confine us. A soundscape that’s both haunting and liberating.

Dark Entries summons Philadelphia synthesizer scribes The Ghostwriters to rouse their ambient masterwork ‘Remote Dreaming’. The late Buchla maestro Charles Cohen and multi-instrumentalist Jeff Cain joined up in 1971 to craft electroacoustic chaos as Anomali, later renaming themselves The Ghostwriters. Their collaborations with choreographers and visual media artists led to their singular style, straddling improvisation and composition, the oneiric and the immediate. Following their debut album, Objects in Mirrors, they were approached by ambient outlet Mu-Pysch. Remote Dreaming would take shape in various studios over nine months. Jeff Cain’s instruments on this project included electric and acoustic pianos, the Juno 106 synthesizer, and a Mirage sampler, while Charles Cohen used his signature Buchla 200 Series Electronic Musical Instrument. A stark departure from the tightly wound first LP, Remote Dreaming shows the duo unfurling with soothing pianos and psychoacoustic textures, its somnambulant drones just skirting the edges of the uncanny. Although ignored in its time, Remote Dreaming is now heralded as a landmark in 80s experimental ambient music. Proceeds will be donated to SOSA (Safe from Online Sex Abuse), a nonprofit that combats online child sex abuse and trafficking.

Senking and DYL team up again. ‘Diving Saucer Attack’ is the first full-length record by the German artist and his Romanian collaborator, released through the Berlin-based Karaoke Kalk label. The six pieces, two of which were produced individually, both showcase the duo’s shared interests for dub-heavy, adventurous electronic music while also emphasising the productive friction generated by the subtle differences between their respective approaches.