Dear friends,

Since I’ve been asked a couple of times lately, I felt like reviving my personal newsletter. I plan it to be a monthly recap, as well as a preview of what’s coming next.

So, below are a few highlights and finds of January 2024.

One discovery in January was the new album by Scanner, Alchemeia. The minimalistic quality of weaving together a limited set of sounds, but teasing the maximum variety of sonic qualities out of them is reminiscent of the best musique concrète practitioners. Still, it's a very tonal album, but in a sense that doesn't look down (or up) at others and is difficult to pigeonhole. It's a delightful experience that doesn't demand too much of the listener's attention and still isn't pure background. Indeed, it floats somewhere in the space between figure and ground and isn't quite tangible, a quality that makes it all the more interesting. Give it a listen, I would love to hear your opinion!

But once again I found pleasure in actually creating music of my own. Partly due to a recent EP commission, but also because my mindset shifted from "music is a pastime and nobody wants to hear it anyway" to "music is part of my identity, and it would be a shame to let it unheard". I don't have anything finished to listen to (yet), but if you're interested in my progress and how I work in general, I invite you to follow me on Instagram. I try to document my process a bit there, also to generate more attention around my work again.

January is always the month of the final presentation's of ELAK's winter term. Being an alumnus and enjoying the serendipitous encounters to be made, this of course was a no-brainer to attend.

The prepared piano in the image above was the centerpiece of a vivid live performance called Mr. Frosch by Kasho Chualan and Sebastian Meyer. In a constantly re-recording tape machine loop, mesmerizing patterns and rhythms evolved that let me want to throw roses on stage. Bravo!

Another rememberable piece was the last act of the evening, one of the most thrilling fusions of drums and electronics I've ever heard. Titled improvisation der entfremdeten subjekte // passiven objekte, it featured composer Miriam Jochmann and percussionist Lan Sticker in a symbiotic, cheerful performance that both of them apparently enjoyed a lot. I did too!

I read the first part of Cixin Liu's "The Three-Body Problem" Trilogy, and as a fan of hard science-fiction, I found the idea of one of the simplest yet still most unpredictable systems in physics (one of three bodies exerting gravitation at each other) forcing a civilization into exodus quite novel and logical. The story has a spiritual component as well though, which loosely connects to Arthur C. Clarke's trope that "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic".

It also bears some similarity to some of the climate fiction I've read recently, such as "The Ministry for the Future" by Stanley Robinson. Not only is the writing style similar, but the fatalism triggered by the fact of humanity's nearing doom leads to comparable character motivation. It's a true page turner and I am already very excited for the next part of the trilogy titled "The Dark Forest".
   

Living in a downtown Vienna condo, we still (have to) heat with gas. This is even exacerbated by the fact that we live in a maisonette, resulting in two temperature zones: upstairs and downstairs. With gas prices going through the roof in consequence of the Ukraine war, starting in 2022 we started saving energy vigorously. To help with that we “smartified“ our heating using Tado. What this appliance does is regulate radiators on a per-room basis and an intelligent plan - for example we don't heat the living room when we're asleep, etc. It also does geofencing, i.e. automatically detects when nobody is at home and down-regulates. Thus, over the last year we've saved around 30% of gas which almost compensated the rising prices. Yay!

I've always enjoyed cooking together with my wife, but since having a kid the variety of meals has diminished drastically 😅 - I think most parents can relate. Lately though, we have been experimenting more and more again, and one delicious result of that were these saffron-honey chicken thighs with roasted hazelnuts 😋




And that's all from me for January. I hope you had a nicer start into the year than I had - I injured my left index finger and had to had the wound stitched, which left me a bit handicapped during the last two weeks of the months. But now that the sutures are out, everything's back to normal - I hope 😉

Tata!
Julian