Slices DVD Mag has just come out with a new edition, this time covering a long Glitterbug feature, alongside with features about great artists like Dave Aju, Steffi, Shed, and Troels Abrahamsen.
Get your copy online or at your local record shop!
I will post the feature here once it’s online, which usually happens a few weeks after the DVD release.
The content of this podcast was recorded at the closing concert of this year’s ℅ pop festival in Cologne / Germany, which took place in the St. Michael’s church in the center of the city. It’s split into two parts (there was a short intermission between the two), the first 27 minutes consist of a composition for electronics and string ensemble named “Egress”, the second part is based on the quieter parts of my last album, “Cancerboy”.
I met the dear people of Smoke Machine from Taipeh / Taiwan last May in the Metrowaves Festival in Beijing, and it’s always amazing to find new friends with a similar outlook on art and music. So I’d like to thank Josh and the crew for the opportunity to share my music in places that I haven’t had the chance to visit yet (but hope to do that soon!).
About Egress:
“Egress is a work for string ensemble and electronics composed and recorded by Glitterbug, consisting of four chapters – Vacuity, Span, Stagger and Appraise.
Continuing his notable cinematic approach and pushing it to its next level, Glitterbug unveils Egress as audible storytelling, similar to radio-play and audio drama scores, dealing with notions of escape, isolation, loss, mourning, and undefined fear.
The composition’s thirty minutes are desolate and bare. They narrate an idea of a final, irreversible departure, presenting a soundtrack travelling through vacuous territories and hollow drifts. It narrates a void of inhabitable space, documenting the emotionality of the sound of a world post society, of a future in an unknown and possibly hostile place.
Egress is formed by a reduced musical structure, built upon discerning tonal subtleties, suspended single notes, and harmonics going slowly atonal.”
About Cancerboy:
Glitterbug’s albums, releases and remixes (on respected labels such as Mule, Nowtown, Ghostly, Ki Records and many more) have long placed him in a musical and artistic category of his own. He is a timeless, skillful and daring producer, immune to hypes and seasonal sub-genre fashions. He has developed his own particular musical language that spans seamlessly between deep techno and abstract intimate compositions, always poignant with score-like textures.
His 3rd studio album, Cancerboy, is another milestone conjoining powerful musical expression with heavy content. Cancerboy is an intimate autobiographical journey investigating one of the major experiences that shaped his life, his childhood struggle with cancer. Cancerboy is a personal, private chronicle of battles won and struggles lost, a sound-log suspended in an in-between world.
Cancerboy is an album on the edge of consciousness. Faraway reverbs and analog roughness gain presence, and forward strides an unreserved sound; candid, direct and near. It’s music that allows itself to be angry and desperate, to battle and depart, to challenge and gall. Yet within all its darkness are driving, hopeful moments that shine bright – celebrating a deep love of life.
Electronic Beats Radio premiered a DJ set of mine last week- thank you Clara Fiedler for chasing after me and for making it happen!! Listen to the mix through the player below or directly on Electronic Beats Radio’s website.
Glitterbug is known for his perceptive approach to close-cropped techno; evocative and deep, his records, like this year’s Cancerboy feel distinctly composed. The same attention to detail runs through today’s Mix of the Day: a 90 minute Glitterbug DJ set which unfurls slowly and seamlessly glides between wintry atmospherics, acid-scorched house and cavernous techno – think Pantha du Prince or fellow c.sides and Ki Records label mate Christian Löffler – with the resolution turned up.
I am flattered that Cyclic Defrost, one of the largest and most important Australian music magazines and blogs, reviewed Cancerboy. Thanks to Joshua Meggit for his loving words! You can read the original article here.
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Techno albums on the theme of cancer are hardly commonplace, and Glitterbug’s Cancerboy, producer Till Rohmann’s examination of his childhood struggle with cancer, cloaks disease and machine rhythms in a uniquely institutional form of anxiety. It’s conceptually closest to Matmos and their A Chance to Cut is a Chance to Cure but sonically more like the soundtracks of Jeff Mills, replacing science fiction with an all too real science fact.
Any fan of electronic music who has spent time in an intensive care unit will be aware of the musical qualities of the various bleeps, whooshes and tones that emanate from life support devices, and this is where Cancerboy begins. ‘Backwards’ is a field recording from the hospital front line, the human presence foregrounded in the laboured Vader-like gasps, surrounded by machine blips and claustrophobic din. These quantize into rhythmic components in ‘To Guess’, a Herbert-like skipping house track that grows both more jazzy and more gloomy as it progresses. By ‘Undertow’ the references are more abstract, acid squelch, heavy bass and reverb all straightforward Techno markers, but the collapse into frenzied electro retains Glitterbug’s idiosynchratic stamp. ‘Those Hopeful Moments’ sounds anything but, a downcast study in Minus linearity, the beatless grey whine of ‘From Here On’ bleaker still, while the vast neon chords of closer ‘We’ll Still Be Here Tomorrow’ offers hope, via the trance-tinged euphoria of Kompakt and Border Community.
Rohmann is wise to keep the direct analogues with the hospital limited, and one finds closer affinities working back, linking dub house shimmers, synthesiser tones and echo with the sounds of treatment. While many of these pieces could be extracted as functional dancefloor tools, the sequencing and variety of styles on presented argue for a linear and narrative listen. It would be too easy to tiptoe around this sensitive subject and offer uncritical praise, but that would be unjust, as Cancerboy is an original and convincing study of hope and dread, mortality and music, and a cohesive and moving album.
Joshua Meggitt