♫♪  Mono Peninsula - Tired Dub

We get old, we forget things, we lose our energy, like the burning star core of sci-fi IDM that we once injected into releases like Music for Spaceports and Skaphander Skanks. Well, those albums weren’t me – I mean, I’m getting older too, with a family, just like Herwig Holzmann, the Austrian electronic mastermind who made them. But that’s where “we” ends. For Holzmann, his heart was a reactor of nuclear fission that exploded outward into his Photophob projects, the ones I just mentioned as well as a bunch of others, and also among a bunch of aliases. Each release felt like you were listening to the covers of hundreds of science-fiction novels from the 1960s at once, all hurtling across the universe at faster-than-light speed, warping time and space and reality and never letting up, never letting go.

The Herwig Holzmann of today doesn’t hurtle – and that’s OK. In fact, he’s replaced the stellar material inside him with dark matter, more ancient, more mysterious, more subtle. Tired Dub, on Berlin’s ROHS! Records, is a sneaky new version of Holzmann’s persona, Mono Peninsula now, his tunes wriggling into your brain and nesting there, like organisms from a far-off world that hitchhiked to one of the spaceports blasting Photophob tunes over the loudspeakers. There they merge with your conscious mind and alter your outlook, rendering any and all surroundings into a dystopian environment. You have no choice but to hunch your shoulders inside your coat against the cold and, with hands firmly jammed in pockets, wander off into the misty night. And Holzmann continues to compose these nocturnal, otherworldly reveries, and your mind wanders to the implications of existence because it’s free to do so now, unencumbered by sensory overload, unbombarded by maximized soundwaves. This is a new ode to Lem – turns out all those books hurtling through space were his.

Chocolate Grinder

CHOCOLATE GRINDER is our audio/visual section, with an emphasis on the lesser heard and lesser known. We aim to dig deep, but we’ll post any song or video we find interesting, big or small.

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