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Changing techno from within, Stefan Goldmann has created his uniquely own form of contemporary art music. Neither constrained by the limits of electronic club music functionality nor by those of academicism, his work topics range from micro
details of production to macro concepts, exposing terminal points of entire genres, formal characteristics or technical formats. His investigation into remixing might serve as an example, including both, a remix that does not change the work's score at all while cutting up dozens of recordings (Stravinsky: Le Sacre Du Printemps), and one that replaces every sound bit until the original is no longer present except for a ghostly structural shadow (Fennesz: Remiksz).
In an environment in which supposedly everything has been done he keeps uncovering and capturing new artistic possibilities. These may be structural, such as in his investigations of tuning systems, irregular metres or loops, or at the crossroads of technology and culture such as the preset worlds of the 'Industry' project or his format-specific works for vinyl or analog/digital-conversion. Intriguingly, this process has also yielded a string of poll-winning underground techno hits along the way: 'Sleepy Hollow', 'Lunatic Fringe', 'The Maze’.
The scope of his work seems vast, yet it all is ultimately derived from the core parameters of techno: grid, loop, sample, edit, track. Unified by a sharp focus in defining distinct aesthetic phenomena and an evolutionary approach to creating new variants within techno, seemingly disparate outings form a cohesive, nearly hermetic body of work: What are the inner workings of electronic music? Which formal devices can be extracted from techno and re-applied to wider contexts?
These are the main lines of inquiry Stefan Goldmann has followed decisively. For this reason, DJing straight-up techno sets is an activity pursued with the same rigor as collaboration with ensembles, choreographers, visual artists and film makers or
running the Macro label together with Finn Johannsen.
Stefan Goldmann performs worldwide, including at the SXSW, Mutek, Time Warp and Club To Club festivals. He received major commissions from Berlin’s Radialsystem cultural centre, the Nationaltheater in Mannheim, BASF and Only Connect Festival in Oslo. At the LACMA museum in Los Angeles and Kyoto's Honen-In Temple he performed site-specific concert formats.
A special relationship has formed with Berlin's Berghain club, at which Stefan Goldmann has been DJing since 2006. He conceived the 'Elektroakustischer Salon' events and writes a column for the club's monthly flyer program. He also published the book 'Presets' and has taught electronic music theory and composition at universities in Germany and Switzerland. For 2020 he has been appointed curator of the Berlin Philharmonic's Strom Festival, where he will also perform a new AV set.
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Changing techno from within, Stefan Goldmann has created his uniquely own form of contemporary art music. Neither constrained by the limits of electronic club music functionality nor by those of academicism, his work topics range from micro details of production to macro concepts, exposing terminal points of entire genres, formal characteristics or technical formats. His investigation into remixing might serve as an example, including both, a remix that does not change the work's score at all while cutting up dozens of recordings (Stravinsky: Le Sacre Du Printemps), and one that replaces every sound bit until the original is no longer present except for a ghostly structural shadow (Fennesz: Remiksz).
