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CD
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ANTIME 030CD
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Sonic Healing is the third full-length release by Martin Steer's Bad Stream project. Conceived and recorded in March 2020, it reflects the tectonic shifts in society taking place at that time while also responding to personal tragedy: having suffered a stroke, his mother lost her language ability. Having been deprived of verbal and physical interaction with other humans, her son's music became her primary means of communication with him. For the album, Steer sent a single guitar loop to twelve musicians from the extended network of his ANTIME label who improvised with the recording, which was later collaged by Steer into a single, 39-minute long track that stylistically ranges from feverish jazz to brooding ambient and abstract electronica. Together with the Iranian artist Arash Akbari's vivid animations based on generative algorithms and real-time processing, Sonic Healing does not ask how one person can deal with turmoil in their life alone, but how we can create new forms of being together with art as a mediator.
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LP
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ANTIME 030LP
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LP version. Transparent green vinyl. Sonic Healing is the third full-length release by Martin Steer's Bad Stream project. Conceived and recorded in March 2020, it reflects the tectonic shifts in society taking place at that time while also responding to personal tragedy: having suffered a stroke, his mother lost her language ability. Having been deprived of verbal and physical interaction with other humans, her son's music became her primary means of communication with him. For the album, Steer sent a single guitar loop to twelve musicians from the extended network of his ANTIME label who improvised with the recording, which was later collaged by Steer into a single, 39-minute long track that stylistically ranges from feverish jazz to brooding ambient and abstract electronica. Together with the Iranian artist Arash Akbari's vivid animations based on generative algorithms and real-time processing, Sonic Healing does not ask how one person can deal with turmoil in their life alone, but how we can create new forms of being together with art as a mediator.
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2LP
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ANTIME 020LP
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Double LP version. Red, transparent vinyl; Gloss HQ print. Having grown up with and on the internet, Martin Steer (1986) has transformed its pull into a concept album that is just as immediate and intangible as the digital world. Bad Stream is guitars and machines vanishing in the spaces between Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails only to reemerge amidst ambient, noise, and drone. Bad Stream, then, is his modus operandi -- a hybrid soundtrack to the feelings of resignation, isolation, and cynicism within neoliberal cyberspace and to that strangely numbing comfort of bodies transmuting into zeros and ones in real time. "I look at my phone even when I play guitar," says Martin Steer, "and that isn't even entirely voluntary. The 2010s really changed my perception of how digital technologies and social media affect me as a musician. Through Bad Stream I want to make sense of this particular kind of anxiety, and to use sensory overstimulation as a way to develop an independent and progressive musical language." The past seven years took Martin and his laptop and guitar from Berlin to Mexico and Nepal and, as a founding member of Frittenbude, into the German charts and to various festival stages. And yet, Bad Stream is a true "Berlin album", out of Friedrichshain, Neukölln, and Kreuzberg and will be released on Martin Steer's own label ANTIME. It was recorded with real drums and programmed beats, with shoegaze guitars, acid baselines, piano, smartphone synths, violins, field recordings from the darknet and his voice, whose hopeless timbre conveys reflections on systems, the future, drugs, people, and his own place. In his ever-expanding A/V live shows and in the music videos, this is supplemented by complex visuals.
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CD
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ANTIME 020CD
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Having grown up with and on the internet, Martin Steer (1986) has transformed its pull into a concept album that is just as immediate and intangible as the digital world. Bad Stream is guitars and machines vanishing in the spaces between Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails only to reemerge amidst ambient, noise, and drone. Bad Stream, then, is his modus operandi -- a hybrid soundtrack to the feelings of resignation, isolation, and cynicism within neoliberal cyberspace and to that strangely numbing comfort of bodies transmuting into zeros and ones in real time. "I look at my phone even when I play guitar," says Martin Steer, "and that isn't even entirely voluntary. The 2010s really changed my perception of how digital technologies and social media affect me as a musician. Through Bad Stream I want to make sense of this particular kind of anxiety, and to use sensory overstimulation as a way to develop an independent and progressive musical language." The past seven years took Martin and his laptop and guitar from Berlin to Mexico and Nepal and, as a founding member of Frittenbude, into the German charts and to various festival stages. And yet, Bad Stream is a true "Berlin album", out of Friedrichshain, Neukölln, and Kreuzberg and will be released on Martin Steer's own label ANTIME. It was recorded with real drums and programmed beats, with shoegaze guitars, acid baselines, piano, smartphone synths, violins, field recordings from the darknet and his voice, whose hopeless timbre conveys reflections on systems, the future, drugs, people, and his own place. In his ever-expanding A/V live shows and in the music videos, this is supplemented by complex visuals.
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