Tracks and words - De:Bug magazine's (1997-2014) aphoristic dance music poetry
Fifteen reviews, for the first time in English, and an introduction by myself
Introduction
De:Bug was a German-language, Berlin-based print magazine that ran from 1997 to 2014, initially as a fanzine-ish pamphlet, then as a proper print magazine. Its tagline was "Electronic life-aspects: a magazine for music, media, culture and self control.” It emerged out of the nascent 90's German techno press, namely the Frontpage (not to be confused with an American political mag of the same name) magazine and fused electronic dance music coverage with left-leaning tech and digital culture reporting. This made its profile somewhat unique when compared to related anglophone magazines. It was more high-brow than dance music mags like DJ Mag and Mixmag but maintained a stronger focus on the club than The Wire. Its enthusiasm for tech and the internet rivaled that of WIRED, but in discussing the newest gadgets it drew on media studies and theory instead of Silicon Valley ideology. In a certain sense, it was an amalgamation of late '90s and '00s Berlin, between Tresor, Berghain, Friedrich Kittler's media theory, and a bustling new digital economy driven by cheap rents.
I first started reading De:Bug around 2010, when I was 17, just getting into underground dance music for the first time. What it offered me wasn't just information, but an entry into the discourse and mythology of dance music’s history and tradition - in other words, the kind of narrative continuity that hardly exists in the fragmented world of the internet. When the magazine eventually closed down in 2014, it was another victim of traditional publishing’s ongoing crisis. Advertisers had dropped out, likely looking to re-orient their ad budgets towards social media. In the years following, more and more established magazines like Spex have closed their doors. Of the once strong German-language music press, little remains.
Music discourse has moved online and has been absorbed into the internet's universal maelstrom and its lingua franca, English. As everywhere, those into music read Pitchfork and Resident Advisor and so on. What has been lost is an entire tradition and discourse of popular music writing that had emerged independently - and often diverged considerably - from whatever was going on in the anglosphere. I don't know how things are looking in the rest of the non-anglophone world, but I assume you will find different stories. Without wanting to play the WWF for extinct and endangered writing, clearly, something has been, and is being, lost. Some of the magazine's former staff run an unofficial online follow-up called Das Filter, but as with all online-only passion projects, it is difficult to match the volume, intensity and regularity of a professionally run print magazine.
However, looking at the bright side - with this substack being an online-only passion project and all - I can dedicate time to something as niche and frivolous as translating a bunch of twenty year old record reviews. The translations below are taken from the magazine's notorious review section, which was always my favorite part to read. Now, I know what you're thinking - record reviews? Who would ever read those for fun? But these aren't your run off the mill PR copy blurbs. This is mad, speculative autodidact writing that spits in the face of conventional journalism's rulebook. This is not music writing as information, criticism or recommendation, but as impression, prose and aphorism. Little to no time is spent on context and history, the syntax is loose and sprawling, the word choices vibrant and colorful. Penning an enormous amounts of bite-sized reviews every month, the magazines editors Sascha Kösch (formerly of Frontpage) and Thaddeus Herrmann (who also co-ran the crucial 00's IDM label City Centre Offices) developed their own idiomatic language to talk about their kind of music.
That language is characterised by a mixture of labyrinthine German syntax, an odd, highly textural vocabulary (wursteln, zerfitzelt, plinkern, verschachtelt) and a whole slew of English loan words transformed in novel ways. Faced with the intranslatability of techno's English core vocabulary, they responded not by searching for German equivalents, but by absorbing the English into a mutant "Denglisch" that remains alien to the English language. Perhaps this is one strategy of writing in a minor language - since with the advent of the internet, every language that is not English has become minor - in the 21st century.
Yet, despite being contemporary with the advent of the internet and digital culture, this writing also is pre-internet in that it still dealt with the inherent delay between words and music of print media. Through the combination of hyperlinks and instant streaming, that delay has been eradicated in contemporary online writing (I'm listening to this right now!). As a result, much written on music today feels like it was written by someone already convinced of the obsolescence of their own words - why am I even writing about this when they can just listen?
But of course, words are not music, and can give something to music that it does not possess in itself. The legendarily terse - usually just a few words long - record descriptions (“Driving, slightly Detroit leaning Techno floaters”) of Berlin's Hardwax record store emerged out of the pre-internet necessity of describing music in a packed mail-order catalogue, but continue to this day, lending something to the music (some linguists have been intrigued by this new genre of language). While De:Bug's mini-reviews are slightly more extensive, they still typically stay around 100-200 words, occasionally going up to three hundred - not a lot of space to write about a form of music that is notoriously difficult to write about.
And yet, it is remarkable how consistently these reviews get to the essence of the music - not through long detours into context and history, but by bringing out something of the music's essence, its singular sonic affects. "This record rolls in like a ride all across Transylvania by night and frost [...] yet somehow, one is glad to arrive by Detroit in the end" is not a sentence any Serious Journalist would ever pen but it manages to evokes a manifold of mental and aural images in just twenty five words. The model for such sentences is not anything you'd ever learn in journalism school but the chattering discourse of the record store, its perpetual, flowing, ad-hoc creation of new neologisms and metaphors (recall the famous record store scene in Human Traffic: “This could turn Hare Krishna into a badboy!”).
The results can be silly (“ancient Hip-Hop breaks are sliced up and served the beatmonsters for breakfast”) but they capture something of the state of free, child-like play that is so often experienced in the rave. With the Adult's Rulebook thrown out of the window, even novel kinds of words emerge. For example, the genre-noun "dub" turns into dubs, one of many little sound-word characters that freely run and jump across the page (powerfully drawn-out dubs which [...] make the tracks appear as a vast, forceful stream of memories"). The German language's propensity for composite words is applied to English loan words, generating a whole slew of novel word-mutations: testimagedub, geotechno, detroitshufflemonster, quantumdub, mangadiscovocoderfilterdiscoeuphoria…
That last one is from a review of one of the lead singles for Daft Punk's Discovery. Mangadiscovocoderfilterdiscoeuphoria? Ridiculous, but is that (very long) word not also what that album is? As if they were Surrealists, Kösch and Herrmann frequently stumble upon across (unconscious?) essences in their fast, quasi-automatic, unfiltered writing. Words don't mean; they are off-ramps towards far-away dreams and atmospheres. Take their frequent usage of "Detroit", never referring to a city in Michigan, but always to a mystical, infinite feeling, the “soul of the machine”: "It's been proven that this ['Detroit'] music is about finding oneself in something that is the soul of the machine; that lets one slide along in a constellation of perfect interfaces [...] everything is quickly blinking out from a time that one cannot forget, because it still lies in the future."
In such sentences, they are not writing as journalists, but as romantics filled with a desire for the messianic sublime of this music - always situated in a future that has yet to arrive. It can never be fully reached, but can be approached in mantraic repetition: "Because everything is always circling around itself, and still is utterly perfect; and even just the idea of repetition could never emerge as anything except as bliss.” The sublime principle of repetition does not just rule over the music - we are talking about techno, after all - but also over the words.
Take another of their favorite English loan words: "deep” / "deepness". It appears over and over again but always points to something slightly different, transubstantiates itself in the unique musical specifics of each new track. Like in Deleuze, repetition is in essence variation and all there ever is; both in art and writing: "What else, but circling around something. Circulation turned into a method, understanding it as exponential, music grasped as something revolving.” The infinite, infernal machine of dance music spitting out a new batch of records - variations on a theme - every week, in turn demanding a new batch of reviews.
Within the magazine's lifespan, the primary form that these records arrived in still was the 12" vinyl EP. Kösch and Herrmann are not only romantics, but also fetishists, obsessed with the specificity of this magical black, round object; its smell, sound, touch, its circling, revolving grooves: “icy winds through the creased vinyl grooves, whose mathematical precision stays unfathomable, just like how vinyl is." Whatever you may think of vinyl as a medium, it is hard to imagine such intimacy to the object emerging out of the generalized, abstract, disembodied world of streaming. Vinyl is their infinite, “unfathomable” object because it embodies the dream, the bliss, the promise of this music to be "Like a commercial that one desires to watch all day, because, somehow, one has to believe that it is indeed the real world.”
So, to conclude this introduction - is this literature? I don't know. Whatever it is, it certainly isn't journalism. I would perhaps call it techno-writing, écriture techno? But you best judge for yourself. For this first part - I may translate more of these in the future - I have translated fifteen reviews from the years 2001-2002 that have resonated with me while re-reading these issues. Among them are reviews of such classics as Drukqs, Discovery, Confield and Lifestyles Of The Laptop Café. I have generally attempted to retain the structure of the original German’s syntax. The resulting English does not read as natural as it perhaps could, but I hope that this approach manages to bring across the writing's idiosyncratic nature. If you want to have a listen to the music reviewed, I have included a Discogs link to each reviewed release, as well as the original issue number and the corresponding pen name ("Bleed" is Sascha Kösch and "Thaddi" is Thaddeus Herrmann). Enjoy!
De:Bug - Reviews (2001-2002)
Arne Weinberg - Through the Colonnades
Heavyweight and dusky with somewhat quaint string sounds, this record rolls in like a ride all across Transylvania by night and frost. Bizarre between Neotrance and Geotechno. Well-produced and multidimensional, yet somehow, one is glad to arrive by Detroit in the end. [De:Bug 45, Bleed]
Autechre - Confield
Autechre return and everything is roughly how one would have expected it, and yet again not at all. Free from paralyzing time-axes and predetermined pattern lengths, Sean and Rob draw a large circle with a digital compass, in which they inevitably submerge England and the fans across the world. It is an enjoyable drowning, as much can be revealed, even if soon, the irritation takes over and one can only commit to this devil's trip. It starts far away, with crackling gamelans, a frugal plinkering and a large amount of accidental noise. The marker is set. On "Confield”, Autechre refine everything that they've worked on in the last few years. Then the grooves break free, sometimes hectic, sometimes careful, always entirely haunted, always manic, practically reference-less; unless ancient Hip-Hop breaks are sliced up and served to the beatmonsters for breakfast. Very dry, precise anyways, within a frequency-spectrum that can only make one shake one's heads, Autechre shrink to particle-size, constantly switching between FM and granular trickery and thus designing their vision of electronic music with a best-by date beyond next week. A showcase of machines and their intestines. Seamlessly connecting to their last releases, just worlds better, rarely strenuous, always exciting, even with a glance back towards this melancholic deepness that has gotten them to where they are today (and affords them to do just about anything). Yes, Confield roughly sounds like one could have expected; it is just simply more impressive, more important, more enduring than anything I had pictured. That this is better than everything else that exists in the same compartment, I hopefully don't have to even mention. Autechre have long ago changed worlds - when will you risk the jump? [De:Bug 47, Thaddi]
DeepChord - DeepChord 012 + DeepChord 013
At once, two new DeepChord EPs arrive this month, and there is a thorough turn to even more dub influences, which by now have taken over the entire structure and sound of the tracks. DeepChord is something like the US variant of, well, what exactly? Of the heritage of Basic Channel perhaps, and from the first track, they set the bassline so far in the foreground that the tracks almost sound like hits, although it is precisely the background, in which everything happens. However, on this EP there are also pieces in which the smooth gliding into endless expanses constitutes the center - if one wants to speak of a center when faced with ideas like this - of the track, the finely-curled sounds, which take over the work of the hats, the breathing hiss that the effects reveal precisely because of their traits, and on the A-side there is a track in which every sound is so finely vaporized that one almost fears that just the act of listening could annihilate it. Quantumdub. Definitely. [De:Bug 48, Bleed]
DeepChord name their vinyl-sides "O" and "OO", justifiably. Finite. Somehow, everything about this label is perfection. Here, "O" means circulation. What else, but circling around something. Circulation turned into a method, understanding it as exponential, music grasped as something revolving. Abstracted as far as possible, in search of the timeless. The flipside means just that as well. In DeepChord, there is only one intention. Only dubs, only new pressings, small interventions in a structure, which, once posited, functions, and strives to be everything, its own depth, its own universe. Three grooves, in the truest sense of the word. [De:Bug 48, Bleed]
Diego - The Persuasion Channel
Already the way in which the entire thing starts as a reminiscence of Detroit has something grandiose, and it is precisely in this remembrance of Detroit in which the entire CD moves onwards and designs the speculatively kicking in a panoramic staging that one hasn't heard so massively in quite a while. Burrowing sequences, rapidly triggered percussion and powerfully drawn-out dubs which lend the light and blissful sounds an extreme vitality and make the tracks appear as a vast, forceful stream of memories, thrills and unstoppable ecstasy that time and again subtly moves towards the center, where others would perhaps get a bit more clichéd. Brilliant album from start to finish. [De:Bug 50, Bleed]
The Other People Place - Lifestyles Of The Laptop Café
I think that Drexciya have never been so smooth before. Never as focussed on that which one could perhaps call love. Why it is called "Laptop Café", we don't know. Perhaps because currently, that is the intersection in which the urban, music and emotions meet. Perhaps not. The eight tracks of the CD are endlessly deep, unbelievably warm, smooth, and cannot be thrown off their path by anything. Instead of actually doing what most would consider "Laptop Music", Drexciya still sound like Drexciya, stronger in the samples than ever before, less analog at first glance, with vocals that wrench the spine out of the body; and in in this mood between darkness and serenity from someone that has seen entirely different wars, this record still sounds like it is in love with the system of transmission that music can potentially be, on every track. Shimmering, hypnotic, unfathomable. Like a commercial that one desires to watch all day, because, somehow, one has to believe that it is indeed the real world. [De:Bug 52, Bleed]
Aphex Twin - Drukqs
Aphex Twin, one would have to be. Sitting in an old bank in the south of London, listening to music, meeting friends in between, then playing Gabba in Scotland; life can be so beautiful. With all this leisure, Richard D. James had almost forgotten to record another album. So, quickly down to the archive, go through CD-Rs and compile something. Voilá. And how! On 30 tracks, spread across two CD or four LPs, the Aphex Twin is wading through through microscopically sliced breaks, turns up everything insanely loud; labyrinthine Acid-basses with English melodies, lays open his entire knowledge of modern programming, then suddenly thinks of the good old times and skips over the Thames, bevor suddenly, complete insanity breaks out again. Never before has Aphex Twin been so fun. And that is only part of it, because apparently, he's recently not only bought tanks and other gadgets, but has placed a bonafide piano in his bank. As Richard Satie, he intermittently straightens things, deals with sweet chords and prepared pianos and reaches entirely novel forms. Weighty and deep, Richard is bridging the time between today and back then. Every track works, without the "Come To Daddy" or "Windowlicker '' shock-moments. Great, because Aphex Twin doesn't need them. Killer. [De:Bug 53, Thaddi]
Daft Punk - Harder Better Faster Stronger
The exprotofrenchmen, discokillers Daft Punk that, in their youth, were once seen smoking in photos - much to the horror of the health ministries of the undergroundsurveillence - craft together, for the new album's hit, something that is, even besides the mangadiscovocoderfilterdiscoeuphoria, just damn funky. Staccato-pop with minimal means and maximum whammy that still has a pop-appeal that sounds like Cher on LSD. Quite absurd, and it likes to stray into the Powerbook-posse with 70s noodlings. We want this in heavy rotation on the radio and on TV. The remixes try to anchor everything with a more electroid fundament (Breakers Break Remix); on the Neptunes mix, this gains hallucinating house-qualities, and even when the offer to just diddle-around is taken on a bit too thankfully at times, they manage to get the right balance between the completely conventional and the deeply twisted. The record's bummer however is the disco-schlager of Mr. Pete Heller. [De:Bug 54, Bleed]
DeepChord - DeepChord 010 + DeepChord 014
Detroit is exactly the place from which such records must originate. The tenth DeepChord comes in orange-transparent vinyl and the music on this record is at least as transparent. Rather like a refraction of light, the groove on the A-side creeps through the far-swung hiss; a few sounds from the coast, a little bit of nothing, but somehow just enough to let everything act differently afterwards. If one is let alone with such a record late at night, one will begin to fuse with the surroundings. Both tracks on the vinyl-flipside seem almost house-y for DeepChord. Their calmest, and somehow most peaceful record so far. [De:Bug 54, Bleed]
Somehow, DeepChord always manages to hold up this infinity of dubtracks with which Basic Channel had started some time ago. Here three of these crackling, light - yet just as hefty - tracks, which drag themselves through the trench of the grooves, in which every sound instantly becomes a chasm; icy winds through the creased vinyl grooves, whose mathematical precision stays unfathomable, just like how vinyl is. Minor masterworks set in all silence. [De:Bug 54, Bleed]
Christian Bloch - Groundbreaking
One of the often forgotten methods of techno is one concerning the center, let's say the "one", constantly displacing it through the modulation of raw sequences. Mathematics is a beautiful thing. Usually, this collides with a type of storm consisting of pure sound, in which the groove can eventually resurrect itself, much to the joy of all those dancing. Bloch is capable of that, which he's shown often enough, and here, in an almost exemplary manner, on "Manta Ray". On the vinyl-flipside, two deeper, calmer tracks, in which the dubs in the background of the pushing groove create a slithering of the dimensions - or, simply a presentation of sound and its own resolution. [De:Bug 54, Bleed]
Rhythm & Sound - Trace
And yet again, the echoes vaporize on the vinyl surface. On "Trace", Rhythm & Sound upend everything, that is to say, the relations between hiss and other hummings coming out of the studio are radically shifted forwards here, stay in the centre, can be admired from all sides, and almost steal the cozy chords' and the loopy, almost drumbox-like rhythm-tracks' show. Testimagedub. Contorted, distorted, hazy and magically enchanting. "Imprint" has declared the beat as superfluous and already outpaced it by miles, it transforms and reduces dub references to planar velvet-sounds, which are thrown back and forth again and again by the bass and the left-over crackles, like in the videogame "am Haus des Lehrers''. Never before have such endless swabs and dots been as important. A milestone, again. [De:Bug 54, Thaddi]
Echoplex - Taking Off
After two rolling, deep detroitshufflemonsters on LL, Echoplex here comes on the American label with slowly whirring and filtered rides over the steppes of the sequential piano-background and a somewhat Chicago-y, slightly blurred track. Rocks everything, but the vinyl has perhaps been pressed slightly dull. [Bleed, De:Bug 55]
Tim Hecker - Haunt Me, Haunt Me Do It Again
Mr. Hecker, Canadian, roommate of Mitchell Akiyama and friend of the whole amazing troupe over there; so Mr. Hecker, who is usually called Jetone and releases on Force Inc., totally kills me here with an album of sheer unbelievable depths and size. Ornamental soundscapes, very modern and digital, and yet unbelievably warm and heartbreaking. This isn't really ambient, nor laptop-shredding, Hecker simply goes deep into his bag of sounds, goes sampling through all of the Canadian radios, and sheets pad after pad and crackle after crackle on top of each other, at times even remembering old indie-harmonies; completely rearranges samples, has mastered the tape-delay just as well as the granular-to-go and creates a warmth and coziness that is Fernsehturm-sized. Never before have clicks been so luminating. Hecker is running circles around everyone. Some of the most beautiful this year. [De:Bug 55, Thaddi]
Dimension 5 - Alien Artform
Somehow, this CD is, from the beginning, shuffling so selflessly in its detroit-y grooves, that one cannot get out before all the mosaic pieces of this of this sound have been turned around a billion times, before its been proven that this music is about finding oneself in something that is the soul of the machine; that lets one slide along in a constellation of perfect interfaces, without anything else being of importance, and that, from Red Planet to Neuropolitique, everything is quickly blinking out from a time that one cannot forget, because it still lies in the future. Simple, heavyweight, dense tracks from John Harvey that circle around the central things, that produce a constellation of machines, as long as one looks at them for long enough. Space, networks, zero-points, machines and algorithms that don't need any letters. [De:Bug 56, Bleed]
Pacou - Sound Structure
The first track of the EP is some of the most cheery, uplifting sound that Pacou has ever made. Tough to say why. Perhaps because the melodic in the sequences is now getting even more dominant, because everything is swirling around and simply makes one blissful with a speed that is almost too much to take? Because everything is always circling around itself, and still is utterly perfect; and even just the idea of repetition could never emerge as anything except as bliss? That he closes with an abstract bell-soundbreak turns the record even more into a kind of classic that one wants to play again and again, even at home. We don't even want to know what will happen when Pacou suddenly only starts releasing tracks without a bass drum. But until then, we are grooving along with this EP's killer tracks, each one of which are so damn deep that one never wants to miss them, and are - even inside that which one would usually call Pacou's terrain - completely refreshing und just so cool, relaxed and new that one could start to think that Pacou has become something like Berlin's jazz icon, simply through consistency. [De:Bug 56, Bleed]
Mokira - Plee
Ah, Mr. Tilliander with a new clicker record. We love it, don't even have to mention it. Simple, cybernetically brilliant loops; unhinged and with a small glance towards SND-displaced sounds, whose transparency has the potential to induce a vision with every new revolving, without sounding as if it were about doing something else entirely. Funky, quadratic, bizarrely dense and still empty like a prism; turned upside down and continuously changing directions, without having to touch anything within its inner structures. One some of the tracks, Mokira even gets dark, but without straining towards the pathos of art; on others, a sheer funkyness sneaks in, without one knowing where he could've gotten such corporeality from, and on other tracks everything is simply a perfect, unbelievable sound-architecture that can be monumental without losing its groove. Brilliant. [De:Bug 58, Bleed]