Nearly 10 years on since his last solo LP, Berlin techno icon Marcel Dettmann arrives on Dekmantel with an expansive album captured in a flash of inspiration.

In many ways Fear Of Programming is a reflection on the artistic process – the critical hurdles one has to overcome, the constant strive for originality, the ability to capture inspiration in its pure moment of inception. Bar the closing title track (and we all know Marcel loves a surprise closing), these 13 tracks came together during a period in which our hirsute host was able to immerse himself in studio practice and set the intention to record an album’s worth of material every single day. From the resulting mass of work there were many options to choose from, and Fear Of Programming stood out as one of the most complete statements on Dettmann’s approach in the here and now.

Unconcerned with an overarching concept, it was the work in the studio which drove the musical direction. No labouring over knotty arrangements, no painstaking mix downs – just honest expression, a moment caught, a groove locked, a stroke of synth sent pirouetting over a cavernous bed of texture. The results are varied, and while you might well hear plenty of bruising machinations in line with the techno Dettmann has made his name on, there are plenty of other shades expressed across the album.

Ambient sojourns, beatless epics and angular electronica have equal footing with strident, floor-friendly workouts. Standout piece ‘Water’ offers an icy ballet of swinging minimal and drip-drop melodics fronted by Ryan Elliott on lesser-spotted vocal duties, urging, ‘give me a sign, just a little something to let me know that you’re mine’. It’s playful, but still underpinned with the sincerity that comes with Dettmann’s work.

Running on instinct, Dettmann presents an honest version of himself in the here and now, speaking through the sonics and not over-thinking the results. His decades of experience helming a thousand techno parties speak for themselves, while his evolution as a musical entity through collaboration and his own BAD MANNERS label demonstrate his appetite for change. Indeed, the working method which resulted in the album also spurred him on to create a live set beyond his well-established DJ practice. Without resorting to a conceited overhaul, Fear Of Programming opens up the idea of what Dettmann represents in the modern techno landscape. More

Repress!
Proper Techno - in depth Ruskin reworks of a Dettmann original More

Repress!
Crafty techno w/ a nautical metalic sound sphere - killer EP! More

Party-starting, jauntily distorted Shake b/w expertly trippy Morphosis remix treatments More

The 2x12” sees the renowned selector and longtime Berghain resident in explorative form, combining compact experimental techno vignettes with writhing, dubby and distorted long- form dancefloor portals – as well as a stoned and unexpected turn into house territory. At 22 minutes over 6 tracks, Test-File is a series of sonic contrasts united by Dettmann’s uncanny intuition for patiently shifting, improvisational dance music. 3-minute opener “Test-File” bangs in with rapid fire kicks and tape-delayed electric zaps, reversing midway into a kind of electronic palindrome. The momentum is sustained on standout single “Ascending”, where an overdriven basswave surges through a tunnel of industrial noise. The EP then emerges into the arch, squishy house of “Autumn77”, filled with sirens, pads and sampled vox/laughter. The second vinyl returns initially to rhythmic experimentation with the 3-minute “Torch” lurching forward rattling and machine-like, interspersed by passages of groan and hiss. “Error (1st Take)” bubbles along dub-wise, tripping atmospherically though a haze of out-of-synch synth bursts. Closer “Metalloid” wraps it all up with a hypnotic, rubber band acid line and smudged 808s clavs. More

Expertly paced, Dettmann II impresses especially with its carefully rising narrative. On first glance, as the album barrels into action with the particulate grit of "Throb" and "Ductil", Dettmann is in fine style. But to the careful listener, these tracks feel lightweight like they're built from aluminum instead of steel. Each tune's central theme is a bit more out there than usual, from the sheet metal racket of "Lightworks" to the house-hinting chorus of "Soar", which is every bit as majestic as its title implies. He offers up some top-notch ambient material as well, like the trippy "Shiver", or the ominous "Outback", which features contributions from Levon Vincent. Dettmann also reaches for a rare collaboration on his second album. Kindred spirit Emika lends her spectral gasps to "Seduction", which stays stunningly antiseptic even as it weaves her voice into its wire framework. With Dettmann II's stretch of tracks "Radar" and "Corridor", the album finally takes flight into full-on club mania, fist-pumping career-high material with all the subtlety of his old work molded up into a spiky banger. "Aim", which ends the record in lofty fashion, hints at a new direction for Dettmann, uncharacteristically melodic and even uplifting. Co-produced by René Pawlowitz, it bears the Shed touch but keeps it firmly in Dettmann's finely-honed world. The first track written for the album and the one that initiated the album sessions in the first place, it carefully hints at new directions while keeping its glance firmly in Dettmann's established history - which you could say for the album as a whole, gently moving towards new horizons but always keeping in mind what made Dettmann's past music so great in the first place. More

As a very special guest Marcel Dettmann returns to 50 Weapons for a celebration of classic techno. Similar to his sold out “Deluge / Duel” single from December 2011, Marcel Dettmann affirms his love of purified, pumping techno - this is #25 in the 50 WEAPONS 12Inch series! More

Dettman is back and and again sets standards with his unique style. More

(Cheeba Starks (1996!), Vril, The Analogue Cops & Answer Code Request) sampler 2 out of 2 for the long awaited second mix-cd from Marcel Dettmann, resident at the notorious Berghain club in Berlin. More

Bluemoon productions (1990!), Morphosis, Signal & FBK) sampler 1 out of 2 for the long awaited second mix-cd from Marcel Dettmann, resident at the notorious Berghain club in Berlin. More

DIALOGUE was conceived as a series of musical letters written back and forth between Luke Slater, Anthony Child (aka Surgeon), KMRU, Lady Starlight, Speedy J and harpist Tom Moth (of Florence + the Machine) at the height of the pandemic between 2020 and early 2021. Using the common language of rhythmic ambient electronics, each DIALOGUE features three actors in a sonic conversation of longform improvisation between 15 and 25 minutes in length, with Luke Slater the common denominator. The results are a brooding, psychedelic exchange of melody, texture, bass, oscillation, key changes and volume swells, which organically merge into complete compositions. It’s music that both reflects and transcends the artists' common reality of isolation – a meditative, consciousness-expanding conversion of musical ideas born from necessity. Cosmic but not escapist. And very much of its time. More

First released by Cazzo Film in 2001, ebo hill’s Bonking Berlin Bastards has long achieved the status of an underground punk porn classic. Like the Cazzo productions of director Bruce LaBruce, hill’s vision was both ahead of its time and a playful distillation of 90s and early-2000s Berlin Zeitgeist: queer, industrial, hypersexual, exhibitionist and fueled by electronic music. The story is told in large part by the soundtrack, to be released for the first time on Ostgut Ton sublabel A-TON. The music follows a group of squatters, punks and drag queens as they fuck, party and stumble their way through an empty city at the turn of the millennium. Approaching these themes more through location than plot, the film’s narrative freedom is also a narrative of freedom; between chance encounters and sex in public, atop the maze of roofs in the city’s former East, bent over bridges and moaning in ecstasy at oncoming traffic, pants down in telephone booths, packed into sex clubs, in the shadows of abandoned factories and techno clubs lost in time. Composed by improvisational techno trio AeoX and noise / industrial producer Rouage aka CNM (respectively), the music spans a broad range of appropriately pounding industrial, weird techno, noise, ultra-stoned ambient, improvised dub and electro. It’s a sonic spectrum that connects Berlin’s queer hardcore techno and squatter party scenes from which AeoX and Rouage emerged, drawing a direct line between the likes of Berghain-forerunner OstGut (a primary meeting point for the film’s cast & crew) to the more industrial, breakcore and noise- oriented independent party collectives and locations who provided multiple settings for the film, including Grüne Hölle and Stellwerk. More

Following 2019’s New Atlantis LP under his experimental techno alias Efdemin, Phillip Sollmann’s Monophonie is a project dedicated to uniting different strands of utopian music. His approach: combining and recontextualizing rare historical instruments of sonic research of Hermann von Helmholtz (19th century) with the self-designed, microtonal instruments of Harry Partch and metal sound sculptures of Harry Bertoia. The result is a psychedelic investigation into just intonation – alternative tuning systems that create unique sets of harmonics not found in conventional scales. Monophonie recasts these sounds into new rhythmic environments where epic kosmische, polyrhythms, acoustic techno and microtonal glow are interwoven into a rare music. Over nine tracks, the album explores multiple forms of minimalism, from unwavering repetition to paired-down chords and sparse sonic environments. But it also seeks to expand the sound spectrum of Partch’s custom built organs and melodic percussion instruments as well as Bertoia’s sonambient singing metal rods into a atmospheric otherworldliness. Monophonie was first composed in 2016 and premiered at Berlin’s Volksbu¨hne theatre in 2017, before it went on to the renowned Ruhrtriennale and Kampnagel in Hamburg. It was performed by one of Germany’s premier neue musik collectives Ensemble Musikfabrik together with Sollmann himself on von Helmholtz’s original double siren, with set design by Michael Kleine and wardrobe by Peter Kisur of Honeysuckle Company. More

In the afterglow of rave’s white heat, the mid-90s were a period of going as far out in all directions as possible – and Luke Slater’s The 7th Plain tracks were certainly about exploration of the deep space of the imagination. Cosmic, analogue, orchestrated, they still represent some of the most emotionally intense music ever to come out of the techno realm. Like its predecessor, Chronicles II is divided between previously released material from the aforementioned albums, as well as four unreleased future classics: “Silver Shinhook”, “Wand Star”, “I Think I Think Too Much” and “JDC”. In contrast, Chronicles III is made up solely of music from the General Production Recordings label catalogue and stylistically skews less toward percussive techno-funk and more toward free-form broken rhythms – though tracks such as “Lost”, “Time Melts” or “Millentum” stand strong as hybrid pillars of both. More

An Invitation To Disappear is the debut LP by British electronic musician Inland aka Ed Davenport – and his first release for A-TON. Based on his soundtrack for a video installation by conceptual artist Julian Charrière, Davenport has recast the material and field recordings into eight tracks of rhythmically intricate electronics and spectral, ambient techno, inspired by Charrière’s visually striking, 76-minute tracking shot through a palm plantation toward a totemic soundsystem on full blast. Both the album and original soundtrack were created in response to the 200th anniversary of the eruption of Indonesia’s Tambora volcano in 1815, which plunged the world into darkness and caused a series of extreme weather conditions More

A-TON is a new edition and platform of Berghain's in-house imprint Ostgut Ton, focussing on ambient, archive and alternative music, differing from the club-focussed records on the main label. Furthermore the first A-TON offering – Chronicles | – marks the start of a series from Luke Slater's The 7th Plain moniker, with remastered, previously released and unheard archive material. First published on General Production Recordings between 1993 and 1996, Slater's The 7th Plain pushed the further burgeoning genre of ambient music towards its boundaries by not limiting itself to mostly beatless synth pads, but by including propulsive beat progressions, nuanced rhythms and subtle melodies. The 7th Plain's extramundane music dodged classification, as heard on the albums The 4 Cornered Room and My Yellow Wise Rug (both on GPR, 1994) – emotional, eerie and escapist music, at the time of release forward thinking records that in retrospect managed to overcome time. Originally recorded at Slater's Spacestation Ø, now all newly mastered for A-TON, Chronicles | depicts the futurist aesthetic and musical agenda of the 90s in a contemporary context, without nostalgia but confidence of its timelessness. With seven original musical pieces and a previously unreleased Ken Ishii remix, The 7th Plain sounds as spirited and relevant as ever. More

A-TON is a new edition and platform of Berghain's in-house imprint Ostgut Ton, focussing on ambient, archive and alternative music, differing from the club-focussed records on the main label. Furthermore the first A-TON offering – Chronicles | – marks the start of a series from Luke Slater's The 7th Plain moniker, with remastered, previously released and unheard archive material. First published on General Production Recordings between 1993 and 1996, Slater's The 7th Plain pushed the further burgeoning genre of ambient music towards its boundaries by not limiting itself to mostly beatless synth pads, but by including propulsive beat progressions, nuanced rhythms and subtle melodies. The 7th Plain's extramundane music dodged classification, as heard on the albums The 4 Cornered Room and My Yellow Wise Rug (both on GPR, 1994) – emotional, eerie and escapist music, at the time of release forward thinking records that in retrospect managed to overcome time. Originally recorded at Slater's Spacestation Ø, now all newly mastered for A-TON, Chronicles | depicts the futurist aesthetic and musical agenda of the 90s in a contemporary context, without nostalgia but confidence of its timelessness. With seven original musical pieces and a previously unreleased Ken Ishii remix, The 7th Plain sounds as spirited and relevant as ever. More