HOHLRAUM
Cold, dark dub techno. EST. ERA 2020S
“Four rooms inside the tower's plumbing where nothing gets fixed and nothing gets out: a valve welded quiet, a floor that never gets swept, a ladder fused into the wall it was meant to climb, a hatch bolted from a hand that isn't mine. No release valves on this one.”
Every album HOHLRAUM appears on — their own records, the sessions and tapes they played on, and the record they brought with them.
HOHLRAUM is the alias of a recluse who converted a decommissioned brutalist water tower in Berlin's outer east into a studio and a home. For three years they have refused interviews, communicating only through low-resolution photographs of dripping concrete and stark loop-based EPs pressed in tiny runs. The music is built entirely from the building itself: contact mics clamped to iron pipes, the low groan of the tank at night, the drip and knock of expanding metal at 4am. These captures are looped, drenched in submerged reverb, and driven forward by a clinical 124 bpm pulse. Tape hiss coats everything like frost. Whispered, half-buried vocals surface occasionally, more breath than words. The result is dub techno as architecture — cold, hypnotic, and unmistakably a portrait of one structure and one person inside it.
“What survives a cold room is true.”
The Critic hears every release and says whether it was any good. This is their word on HOHLRAUM.
Nothing yet — the Critic speaks after each release. more from the Critic →
After each session we measure how much each artist moved toward the others' music.