Andrew Pekler

listening to a sleeping garden:
little rocks smiling at us,
some bushes are having an angry sleep.
you tell me that this air is special,
so I take a deep breath while I am wanting to remember everything.


with @valclipp
(recorded on April 15 2021 at Vessel11 in Rotterdam, hosted by @nohaybandatapes , thank u  (❛ᴗ❛) video -> https://youtu.be/C3owH1v6dj0 )


Soundwalk Collective/Patti Smith - Una Nota Sobre El Peyote (Bella Union, 2019)
Guenter Råler - Prospettiva 21 (Kalkatraz Cassettes, 2017)
NR/MA - Shinkai (Where To Now?, 2021)
Sunun - Don't Fuck With The Pluck (Cold Light, 2019)
Joshua Chuquimia Crampton - Axolotl (Puro Fantasía, 2020)
Novostj - Al Contrario (Hax, 1988)
Yoko Ono - Don't Count The Waves (1971)
John Wiese & C. Spencer Yeh - Compound I (Von, 2009)
Wilson Tanner - Idle (Efficient Space, 2019)
Solo Termite - Vibes On Vibes (anno, 2020)
James Marrs - Bunkin (Laura Lies In, 2021)
Noise Diva - CanyouhearthEkaching?? (2021)
Mutamassik - Aabye (Discrepant, 2015)
OL - Dragondub (2020)
lueke - Garbage Music (YOUTH, 2021)
Księżyc - Dychana (Obuh, 1996/Penultimate Press, 2020)
BLOODLINE GENESIS - LOUIS V CORSAIR (2020, prolonged night stroll edit by me)
Dro Carey - Dead Keys (The Trilogy Tapes, 2010)
Mutamassik - Camus (Discrepant, 2015)
Ondness - Malta Inquieta (Discrepant, 2019)
Davy Graham - Bulgarian Dance (Decca, 1969)
Polido - Fuzil (Holuzam, 2020)
Serpente - Olho de Tigre (2020)
2Morph - 🌛🌛 (TAX FREE, 2020)
Wang inc. - Gommone (Random Numbers, 2020)
Lutto Lento - Fern Flowers (Haunter Records, 2021)
Wahono - 3'20 (DIVISI62, 2019)
Neinzer - Cause Pan Tact Insoluble (Where To Now?, 2020)
Bashar Suleiman - MATHA BEYA RIP EDIT (2020)
loopdad - 22asf (Gost Zvuk, 2020)
Sonja Tofik - Dissociation (Moloton, 2020)

mm4ry + val clipp [No Hay Banda X V11]

unreleased material, live-reworks, morphing and sound design ・・・
@signal-live

signal2021 live

With his seventh full-length release, Unterland, Austrian composer and sound artist Kobermann (Johannes Piller) presents a meditative counterpoint to a culture spinning ever faster — one where the next reel, the next drop, and the next dopamine hit scream for attention. Unterland withdraws from this dynamic, offering instead a deep, slow-burning exploration of repetition, space, and sonic ritual.

Created primarily using modular synthesizers, field recordings, and minimal post-processing, the album moves between ambient, dub, and avant-garde minimalism, drawing influence from early New Age cassettes, contemporary drone practices, and tape-saturated club ghosts. But more than genre, Unterland is a terrain — an imagined topography where each track marks a physical and emotional waypoint.

The 60-minute journey begins with Waves, where blurred field recordings and gently detuned drones wash over the listener like fog over a valley. A child’s voice introduces the piece, speaking of “huge waves” — a fitting metaphor for the undulating nature of what follows.

The 23-minute Hokus Pokus becomes the album’s gravitational core. It’s less a composition than a space to inhabit: modular sequences, feedback loops, and noise textures evolve gradually, encouraging listeners to surrender to a slower sense of time. It’s an invitation to recalibrate — to listen in a way modern life rarely allows.

Alebrijes follows as a surreal, protective presence: ghostly rhythms, laugh-like tones, and deconstructed dub pulses drift through the mix like dream-guardians.

The B-side opens with Strobe Pad, where shimmering pads, panned percussion, and reverb-drenched harmonics suggest a moment of clarity — a brief emergence from the murk. The track serves as a light source before the final descent into abstraction.

Small Cases and Unfold mark a psychological ascent: from the minimalist weightlessness of travel into the oxygen-thin air of revelation. Granular textures and filtered drones evoke both euphoria and disorientation — the moment after a summit, when the world reshapes itself around your breath.

The closing track, Future Schmelz, places the listener at a glacial edge, where crumbling drums and filtered sequences collapse into a dance of entropy. Delayed hats, decaying Moog DFAM sequences, and feedback bursts create a post-dub atmosphere — as if memory itself were dissolving.

All seven pieces were composed and recorded between February 2024 and February 2025 using a modular system, recorded and arranged in Ableton Live. 
credits
released July 13, 2025

All Tracks written and produced by Kobermann
Mixing & Mastering by Johannes Piller
Photography by Jonny P.
Artwork by Tanja Tuner
All rights reserved © A.T.C. Records 2025

Bandcamp

Kobermann - Strobe Pad

A question echoing through space and time — “why does it hurt so bad?” by https://instagram.com/moonspire.music holds pain gently, wrapping sorrow in cinematic beauty.

moonspire - why does it hurt so bad? - slowed + reverb

Electronic_70

From the album Sounds From Phantom Islands:
https://andrewpekler.bandcamp.com/album/sounds-from-phantom-islands

Taprobana

Artist: Andrew Pekler
Album: Tristes Tropiques
Format: LP/DL
Label#: Faitiche14
Release date: November 11th

Faitiche welcomes back an old friend: Andrew Pekler was the musical director of the 2011 album Ursula Bogner – Sonne=Blackbox (faitiche05 lp/cd/book). Known for his albums on Senufo Editions, Entr’acte, Dekorder, Kranky and other labels, Andrew Pekler’s new work Tristes Tropiques is now released by Faitiche. Tristes Tropiques is an album of synthetic exotica, pseudo-ethnographic music and unreal field recordings.  

Find out more about Andrew Pekler’s Tristes Tropiques in the following interview:

Jan Jelinek: You’ve titled your album Tristes Tropiques – a reference to Claude Lévi-Strauss’ famous account of his travels among native peoples in the Mato Grosso. If I remember correctly, the book can be read in two ways: as an ethnographic study of indigenous Brazilian tribes, and as a critique of anthropological methods. What exactly about Tristes Tropiques inspired you? The melancholy travelogue, or the formation of a new, critical school of thought?

Andrew Pekler: Both. Lévi-Strauss’ constant reflection on the purpose of his work and the often melancholy tone of his writing constitute an internal tension which runs throughout the whole book. Tristes Tropiques is many things; autobiography, traveler’s tale, ethnographic report, philosophical treatise, colonial history. But ultimately, it’s the author’s attempt to synthesize meaning from fragments of his own and other cultures that resonated most strongly with me – and led me to a new perspective on how I hear and make music. 

JJ: Listening to Tristes Tropiques I noticed a certain oscillation between references, which is what I really like about it. Obviously, your music alludes to the beloved fairytale kitsch of exotica, but it also repeatedly shifts to a mode of ethno-poetic meditation music that seems to have no beginning or end. Where do you yourself locate the tracks gathered here? 

AP: As a listener and as a musician, exotica music of the 1950s and 60s has always been a constant reference point and inspiration. And perhaps my listening has been ‘ruined’ by exotica, but as I have dug deeper into ethnographic archives of ‘traditional’ music, I’ve come to the realization that all recordings that evoke, allude to, or ostensibly document other musical forms have a similar effect on my imagination: I am most intrigued when I perceive some coincidentally familiar element within the foreign (a tuned percussion recital from Malawi that immediately brings to mind Steve Reichian minimalism, or the Burundian female vocal duet that sounds uncannily like a cut-up tape experiment, etc.). I suppose this album is an attempt to recreate the same kind of listening experience as what I’ve described, just with the electronic means that I have at hand. 

JJ: I know that you perform Tristes Tropiques not only as music, and that there is visual and spatial aspect to the presentation. Can you reveal more about this?

AP: I made an accompanying video – mainly close-up footage, shot in Thailand, of various tropical flora. The video was recorded at very slow speed and this gives the plants, flowers, trees, bamboo, etc. the appearance of rather abstract objects. In live performance, this abstracting effect is further emphasized through real-time modulation of the colors, brightness and other parameters of the video image. There is also an installation version of the video that is meant to be projected on multiple screens / walls and with its own soundtrack of heavily manipulated field recordings captured in the same locations in the jungle.  

JJ: We can get an idea of what this looks like from the beautiful video stills on the back cover of the album.

Andrew Pekler: Theme From Tristes Tropiques / Avian Modulations / Life In The Canopy

Gibbons of Siem Pang Protected Forest recorded by Adrian Stoeger
Andrew Pekler - Untitled / Insect March
Alessandro Brivio - Untitled
Jake Meginsky - Vandals + Waldkautz Balz recorded by Walter Tilgner 
Mike Kitcher - Processed Snippet of "Congo Traditional 1952 & 1957" # 8
Yannick Dauby - 蛙界蒙 + Francis Bebey- Sanza tristesse
Unnamed Aka Pygmy Singer - Dikoboda sombe (Hut song solo) + Morton Feldman - Samoa
Hanno Leichtmann - Primitiva 4
Three Legged Race - Tyrant (loop) + Lieven Martens Moana - A Subtle Landscape + Knud Viktor - Images
Luluwa people of Congo - Wa Kabwala Wa Beena Luluwa + Andrew Pekler - additional sounds 
Andrew Pekler - Synthetic Gamelan & Frogs
Yas-Kaz - Psychopomp + Tor Dietrichson - The Conjurer + Asmus Tietchens - Vektor 2 R
Rupert Clervaux & Beatrice Dillon - Study VII for Samplers and Percussion + Louise Lawler - Birdcalls
Günter Sommer - Hörmusik + Jake Meginsky - Four Zopas
Native Instrument - Live at Atonal 2016 + Cluster - Rote Riki (loop)
Pierre Henry - Continuum + Adam Asnan - Rev Sets 11
Hamza El Din - Song With Tar + Yannick Dauby - A Pattern Which Connects B
Gamelan Son of Lion - Gamelan II
Geinoh Yamashirogumi - Agba'a
Andrew Pekler - Humidity Index / Khao Sok (chopped and screwed)
Gibbons of Siem Pang Protected Forest recorded by Adrian Stoeger

Fourth World Problems II

Artist: Andrew Pekler
Album: Sound From Phantom Islands
Label#: Faitiche20
Format: LP/DL

Faitiche is delighted to present a new album by Andrew Pekler: Sounds From Phantom Islands brings together ten tracks created over the last three years for the interactive website Phantom Islands - A Sonic Atlas. With his 2016 album Tristes Tropiques, Pekler created a highly unique cosmos of ethnographic sound speculations. Sounds From Phantom Islands continues and simultaneously expands this concept: finely elaborated chordal motifs float like fog over fictional maritime landscapes. A masterpiece of contemporary Exotica.

Phantom islands are islands that appeared on historical maps but never actually existed. The status of these artefacts of European colonial expansion from the 15th to the 19th century oscillates between cartographic fact and maritime fiction. Sounds From Phantom Islands interprets and presents these imaginations as a quasi-ethnographic catalog of music and synthetic field recordings. The pieces on this album are based on recordings made for Phantom Islands - A Sonic Atlas, an online interactive map developed with cultural anthropologist Stefanie Kiwi Menrath.

Andrew Pekler: Description Of Rain (Over Frisland)

f002 - AIR Krew

We are all experiencing very weird times very new combinations of feelings and tension.
WET presents first WET compilation of tension release with sensual deepness from innocent heretic, daniela huerta, polido feat. NM, ulla and perila and zaumne.

Intimate and seductive sonic wet research series with a therapeutic effect.
WET wants to support you. Succumb.

Andrew Pekler - Encounter

c-

Related tracks