Ah! Kosmos

Baba Yaga's Hut present: Ah! Kosmos & Hainbach at IKLECTIK, November 19th Gentle Hum is the second duo album by Berlin-based electronic music artists Ah! Kosmos and Hainbach. Following their 2023 debut Blast of Sirens, the 14 pieces see Basak Günak and Stefan Goetsch work with non-musical instruments capable of creating experimental music to haunting and melancholic effect. Their patient and careful excavation of textures and tones treats noise and hum not as incidental artefacts, but as integral, living elements of the sonic realm. The intricate interplay of the rhythms and sounds of test equipment, analogue synthesizers, occasional piano accompaniment, and even processed vocals provide the soundtrack to a journey through in-between states and suspended time. Günak and Goetsch are prolific recording artists, the former having been releasing experimental electronic music under the Ah! Kosmos moniker as well as creating sound installations and compositions for performance and film under her real name. Besides putting out many solo and collaboration albums, Goetsch has also worked as a film composer on movies such as Fatih Akin's Amrum and runs a YouTube channel on which he often demonstrates the potentials of rare music gear and non-musical machinery. Indeed, the duo takes the sonic output of nuclear test equipment or dolphin filters from marine biology as its starting point. "These sounds aren't neutral; they carry the weight of time passing through machines and bodies," explains Günak. "When you stop trying to clean it up, they reveal their behaviour as organisms. They have weight, they evolve, they resist." Enduring and indeed working with said resistance is the guiding principle of the duo's exploratory recording sessions. "We switch roles all the time and move between stations a lot," says Goetsch. "Sometimes I play the wall of test equipment and Basak rides the faders, sometimes it is the other way around." Among the hardware used on Gentle Hum is the Collide 4 synthesizer module designed by Goetsch in collaboration with Joranalogue to concentrate his wall of test equipment into a single Eurorack module as well as other unconventional instruments such as an acoustic fan organ produced in the GDR. Tape process, filters, and mixers as well as recordings of noise floor added to the development of what Günak calls the duo's "own vernacular." The resulting pieces were carefully arranged for the final release, its titles speaking of an interest in transitional situations. "I'm drawn to states where perception slips a little, and to the in-between states that question the event itself," explains Günak. "That moment just before or after an event, when it is still becoming or undoing itself." This notion reverberates through the entire album as a sense of slipping in and out of consciousness to the densely layered, rhythmically punctuated soundscapes dreamt up by Ah! Kosmos and Hainbach in collaboration with their machines-a gentle hum indeed.