attenuation circuit

Carsten Vollmer + Martine Chine

Carsten Vollmer and Martine Chine collaborate on a massive chunk of deep dark drone noise interspersed with fragmented sounds that may signify the “remnants of the past” hinted at in the somewhat faux-Freudian title, “Angstlust” meaning the thrill one can get by voluntarily venturing into dangerous situations. In a certain way, venturing outside of the controlled realm of 'proper' musical practice into the mayhem of a harsh noise performance can probably offer a sonic equivalent to this kind of thrill, so the title seems somewhat programmatic for the meeting of these two adept noise performers – Martine Chine with their more rhythmic, percussive approach and Carsten Vollmer working with harshly distorted oscillating frequencies.

KLONK I ANJA KREYSING I EMERGE

All tracks were composed for Flow. A project by Dr Martina Cecchetto, with the scientific contribution of Dr Florian Betz and the artistic curation of Riccardo Fumagalli, in collaboration with Cities & Memory, the University of Padua (Italy), and the University of Würzburg (Germany).

EMERGE

3 track album

Stadlmeier | Rovar17

Sascha Stadlmeier aka EMERGE and Rovar17 have toured and collaborated extensively over quite some time. So this album, which captures two half-hour sets from their spring 2026 tour, is not so much a document of spontaneous jam sessions, but rather a mature co-composition in two movements. As usual when collaborating with other partners in improvised contexts, Sascha Stadlmeier uses his last name, rather than his EMERGE moniker, for this release. Adding Stadlmeier's nonconformist guitar and bass playing techniques to Rovar17's synthetic sounds, the duo create a dense, bass-heavy dronescape interspersed by glitches. In contrast to earlier releases, this album features a suprisingly high amount of voices. The idiosyncratic use of field-recordings, or rather: found sounds of bizarre conversations, adds a strangely surreal touch of displacement, which is not without a certain humour - the kind of humour you get when Asmus Tietchens meets Samuel Beckett at the dissecting-table, perhaps.

Dirk Serries | Asmus Tietchens

With Dirk Serries and Asmus Tietchens, attenuation brings together two towering figures of experimental sound. Serries—known for Vidna Obmana and Fear Falls Burning—has been a key force in shaping (dark) ambient, while also maintaining a presence in free jazz. Tietchens, one of the most respected composers of electroacoustic music outside academia, has spent over six decades crafting a singular body of work spanning ambient, industrial, noise, and musique concrète. His influence on global experimental sound culture remains profound. Their collaboration dates back to the 1990s, beginning with an untitled album (Syrenia, 1995), followed by Motives for Recycling (Soleilmoon, 1999), which included reinterpretations of earlier Tietchens material, and the double album The Shifts Recyclings (Soleilmoon, 2002), where both artists reworked source sounds by Frans de Waard’s project Shifts. After a two-decade hiatus, they reunited in 2022 with Die Höfner Akten (aufabwegen), a work rooted in musique concrète, in which Serries’ acoustic guitar sources remained partially recognizable within Tietchens’ precise and analytical processing. Their new album, Die Regeninsel, takes a different path. Built on Serries’ richly processed electric guitar textures, the music unfolds into expansive, immersive drone-ambient landscapes. Tietchens reshapes these materials through layering and density, evoking shifting sonic “states” of precipitation. While the evocative, almost programmatic titles suggest a more “naturalistic” listening mode—unusual for Tietchens—they leave ample space for abstraction, allowing the listener to move freely between image and pure sound. File under: drone, dark ambient

rsn | Carsten Vollmer

Thomas Rosen aka rsn continues his exploration into the universe of dronescapes with varying collaborators he started with a series of albums on attenuation circuit in 2025. In this latest chapter of his ongoing story of drone, he joins forces with Carsten Vollmer, himself a prolific collaborator. "I work with frequencies", is how Carsten Vollmer describes his practice, the implication being that if noise is intense enough it can cover all frequencies at once. In their collaborative work, rsn and Vollmer try out different approaches to "noise" - those with an abstract electronic timbre, and those that carry the overtones of sonic "dirt" (feedbacks, electromechanics) with them. With all the microtonal pushing and shoving - pogo in the ear canal, so to speak - going on within the walls of this sound, you could sum up this album with the motto: "Always static, never boring".

Exogeny I Graneg Sandpapier I Foltergeist I RinniR

This edition of THING is a trip into dark sonic regions. The cinematic, doom-laden, quasi orchestral sound of Exogeny from Oregon sets the mood for what is to come. Graneg Sandpapier from Cologne continues the walls of gloomy chords, but supplements them with metallic, percussive sounds, like pieces of industrial debris rattled by the wind, banging against the sooty bricks of an abandoned factory. (Post-) industrial is a word that also comes to mind when trying to describe the third piece, the most rhythmic on the album, by Foltergeist - which feels as if the machinery once housed in the abandoned factories was coming back as a psychedelic ghost. The closing track by RinniR masterfully unites the strands of mournful drone and feisty noise that create the exciting tension that runs through this whole album by confronting them full on to great effect.

philippe neau

In case you were wondering about the "O" at end of the title: It's neither English nor German, but French, where West is spelled Ouest. Because, of course you guessed what the artist himself confirms: "This is the compass location of the place where I work with sound, where I created this album. The tracks are composed of natural, organic, noisy, melodic or atmospheric sounds captured here and there. The idea here is to offer mysterious pieces that take the listener to a fictional and distant sonic space."