Sieren

BIO

On November 15, Sieren, a.k.a. German musician, photographer, and field recordist Matthias Frick (OWSLA, R&S, Ki Records, Project Mooncircle), will release his first EP of 2024. The release, entitled Serenity, sees the producer and long-time photographer flits between all sorts of lineages: mid-aughts heart-on-sleeve electronica, barely-there IDM, Ibizan downtempo. Throughout the record’s ebbs and flows, he finds something both familiar and new, gesturing towards all sorts of dancefloor histories even as he points towards a calmer future.

It’s not as though this focus is new, of course. Frick first self-released music as Sieren over a decade ago, back in 2011, but his music has long stretched towards the past: his first productions dipped into the sun-kissed sounds of trance, and in the mid-2010s, he fell in with UK dance-music idioms, which is itself a veritable constellation of sounds, ideologies, and genres. That melting-pot approach is clear in Serenity, a potent distillation of umpteen styles that nevertheless feels like something entirely new: it’s 8-a.m. rave-ups and 11 p.m. ambience; it’s 1992 and 2025; it’s both sides of the Atlantic with somewhere in between thrown in for good measure; it’s field recordings ripped from a club night that never happened.

Much of the record was composed over Ableton Live, but Frick used plenty of gear and plugins to emulate classic synthesizers. “In general, I like plugins that bring some sort of analogue warmth with them,” he wrote. “In a way, they resemble the aesthetics I’m trying to go for when taking photos as well: either a bit oversaturated or a bit washed out and faded.” That warmth shines throughout the record, with each track offering a different kind of sunlight.

“Waves,” the EP’s opening track, establishes the Venn diagram Frick has drafted up here: playful and ebullient in equal measure, with kick drums doubling as heartbeats and synthesizers that feel like they’re sprouting from the ground underfoot. This sets out the record’s sound and tone—neither “club” nor “listening” music, exactly, but something that could work in either context; its low-end could shake the ground if that’s your speed, but the lush synthesizer pads and drum programming—is that a human voice buried in the back of the mix?—keep things in more laid-back territories.

Never mind the particulars, though. On Serenity, a dance-music lifer takes idioms from beat tapes, club nights, and headphone sessions in equal measure, blending them until any sort of aesthetic distinctions are besides the point. This is an EP about feeling above all else: heartstrings stretched between universes, drums acting as stepping stones from one feeling to the next, each, somehow, more plaintive and sun-kissed than the last. Here, Frick imagines dance music as a sepia-tinged thing, each kick drum and hi-hat coated with the warmth of a fond memory.

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