Modular synths. Nuclear test equipment. Dolphin filters from marine biology. Berlin duo Ah! Kosmos (Başak Günak) and Hainbach (Stefan Goetsch) make modern, free-spirited improvisational music guided by the unpredictable analog creaks, rattles and hums of non-musical machinery.
“These sounds aren’t neutral; they carry the weight of time passing through machines and bodies,” says Günak. “When you stop trying to clean it up, they reveal their behaviour as organisms. They have weight, they evolve, they resist.”
Günak and Goetsch are both prolific recording artists in their own right. Günak has released experimental electronic music under the Ah! Kosmos moniker as well as creating sound installations and compositions for performance and film under her own name. Goetsch has worked as a film composer on films such as Fatih Akin’s Amrum and runs a YouTube channel where he explores the potential of non-musical machinery and early electronic instruments. The Wire has called his music “one hell of a trip.”
Gentle Hum (2026) is their second album as a duo, following their debut Blast of Sirens (2023): fourteen densely layered pieces with a haunting, melancholic quality built from the rhythms of test equipment, analogue synthesizers, piano, cello and processed vocals. Their patient excavation of textures and tones treats noise and hum not as incidental artefacts but as integral, living elements in the sonic fabric they weave. Equal parts concert, improvisation experiment and sound installation.
