aphtc is a collaborative project founded Berlin and Mainz-based producers Kl.ne and CRΞSC who are bonded by their youth experiences within the hardcore/punk scene and their love for modern bass music. Last year, the duo launched Arcane Patterns – a record label which ‘follow the broken beats, not the linear dreams’ according to their Bandcamp page. Their debut release, ‘When Grounds Shift’ explored ambient breakbeat and post-jungle sounds whilst their follow up EP ‘Rewind The Subject’, released earlier this year, saw aphtc enter the vortex with two murky rollers.
With the producer’s profile still a bit of a mystery, aphtc talk us through some of their key influences from Mark Fisher and Suspiria to Alan Partridge.
Bubonix – Fuck Love
The German Hardcore/Punk ambassadors Bubonix were one of the most inspiring radical voices with strong political messages against racism, sexism, homophobia, state violence, and discrimination of all kinds in the early 2000s.
Rosi Braidotti -Nomadic Theory – The Portable Rosi Braidotti (book)
In these collected essays of one of the most important radical contemporary philosophers, she outlines her positive critical theory: our being in the world should be thought of as constantly nomadic, never opposed to a dominant hierarchy and always in the process of becoming. At one point she asks a question that couldn’t be more relevant today: Why don’t we think of human beings having multiple belongings, multiple ways in which ethnicity, nationality and citizenship can actually be combined? Can we think of ways of being globalized, of becoming planetary, or are we stuck with this neoliberal model?
Kode 9 – Xingfu Lu
Kode9 teached us to unlearn any stylistic tropes. His metaphor of sound as a virus constantly turns into reality with the ever mutating sounds of Hyperdub, from Dubstep to Footwork, Grime, UK Funky, Gqom, 90s video game music, and all kinds of weird hybrids. This might be a good example of this futurist sonic fiction.
Suspiria (Movie)
Apart from polyrhythms and coffee we love tension and eeriness, and this film – both the original and the remake, is one of the best examples for evoking an atmosphere of unexplainable dread driven by forces we can’t see, a bit like how we as humans try to find our voices in a huge impenetrable capitalist system that is radically commodified.
Propagandhi – Purina Hall of Fame
The album “Today’s Empires, Tomorrow’s Ashes” influenced us a lot and it is still one of the best examples of how to combine musical skills with heavy sonic impact and sharp political lyrics.
Alan Partridge
Pretty funny, this guy [smilie].
Demdike Stare – Forest of Evil
Demdike Stare opened up another dimension with a concept of combining unique sound design and production with mythology, artwork, and eerie motion pictures…
Paradoxical Frog (Ingrid Laubrock, Kris Davis, Tyshawn Sorey) – at The Stone, NYC – Aug 1 2014
Jazz has always been very important to us, both in musical and general terms, being a genre that is constantly reinventing itself and is best experienced live, pushing the listener into the sheer totality of the Now. This trio, featuring the amazing soprano saxophonist Ingrid Laubrock and Tyshawn Sorey (who is probably the best drummer in the world), is just mesmerizing.
Loefah – Ruffage
We can’t help it, but this amazing tune is not just a perfect sonic paracetamol but also subbass driven ego annihilation at its best.
k-punk – The Collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher (2004-2016) (book)
Mark Fisher makes you constantly look behind the curtains of the smooth 21st century surfaces. He states that the personal is not just political anymore (as the feminist Carol Hanisch phrased it in the 1970s), but that the political is privatised, for example through Social Media: To support emancipation, we (in an intersectional sense) have to constantly reject any form of capital’s tendency to individualise, and conceive ourselves as interconnected beings by building solidarity among both the assumingly white privileged as well as marginalised groups such as queer, disabled, immigrants. As a Neo-Marxist he was also responsible to introduce the category of class back into the political discourse that has been so much dominated by the privileged. Fisher was a former member of the para-academic Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU) together with the above mentioned Kode9, but also Sadie Plant (“Zeros and Ones”) and Kodwo Eshun (“More Brillant Than The Sun”) investigating sound, cybernetics, and afrofuturism.
Jlin – Carbon 7 (161)
Jlins breathtaking music is like sonic body politics: you are constantly jumping from plateau to plateau in which you are constantly becoming. This song comes along with a mind bending video choreographed by Corey Scott-Gilbert. His movements also serve as a guide for how to dance to Jlins hyper-polymetric beats – for those who are stuck on the dancefloor.
Check out Arcane Patterns here.