The annual unusual sounds gathering in Barcelona, the OMBRA Festival, will take place this year between 6 and 8 December. This will be the sixth edition and it will take place again at ENMASA, the former Mercedes-Benz factory, a location that perfectly embodies OMBRA’s essence of industrial aesthetics.
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‘No Photos on the Dance Floor! Berlin Techno 1992–Today’, compiled by Heiko Hoffmann, follows a hugely successful photography and video art exhibition by the same name that was co-curated by Hoffmann and shown at C/O Berlin in late 2019. The exhibition included works by photographers and visual artists such as Wolfgang Tillmans, Romual Karmakar, Sven Marquardt and Camille Blake, that dealt with Berlin’s club culture since the fall of the wall. It was followed in 2020 by a book of the same name which collected together the most striking imagery from the exhibition alongside interviews and personal essays.
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Wolfsheim are a synthpop duo from Hamburg, Germany consisting of Markus Reinhardt (music) and Peter Heppner (lyrics and vocals). The band was founded in 1987 by Markus Reinhardt and Pompejo Ricciardi and was named after Meyer Wolfsheim, a fictional character from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel ‘The Great Gatsby’. Ricciardi soon left the band and was replaced by Peter Heppner, a childhood friend of Reinhardt’s. Together they produced their first demo tape, ‘Ken Manage’, in 1988. After making a second demo tape, ‘Any But Pretty’, in 1989, Wolfsheim applied at various labels until they caught the attention of independent record label Strange Ways Records. They are best known for their debut breakthrough single, ”The Sparrows and the Nightingales”, the first single to be released on Strange Ways in 1991. The band’s musical style takes cues from the 1980s New Romantics, new wave, synthpop, and darkwave. The track’s sombre synths were produced by Carlos Peron of Yello. Reinhardt says the lyric was inspired by ‘The Great Gatsby’, ‘in the ‘onomatopoeic tension’ between predator and security.’ Over six minutes, the narrator describes being lost, unsure of where his life is heading, using highly metaphorical language. On the flip is a brand new remix by German producer Ancient Methods, a pseudonym of Michael ‘Trias’ Wollenhaupt, who provides a driving, EBM-leaning, amphetamine-laced club ready cut.
“Lies,” a track from the now-defunct UK experimental group Bourbonese Qualk, get new life by way of a vinyl release on Mannequin Records with Ancient Methods on edit and remix duties. “Lies”, a terse, TR 808 driven electro-tinged cut just under two minutes long, originally came out in 1986 on the Preparing For Power LP by way of the group’s own label Recloose Organization.
Ugandan Methods = Ugandan Speed Trials (Regis) + Ancient Methods. ‘Sixth Method’ is their second collusion of Industrial Techno mechanics, following a razing session on Downwards’ DN label in 2009. A-side is the droning, ‘floor ploughing behemoth ‘Beneath The Black Arch’, spiking AM’s war funk rhythms with a seething tribalist madness to deadly impact. Flipside ‘Between A Sleep And A Sleep’ relies on a more subtle sense of swing and hypnotic layering to deliver the desired effect, before they gorge on bludgeoning kicks and skin-flailing noise with remorseless brutality on ‘She Belongs To An Eternity’.
The Hipodrome Of Music 