"A new duo from Berlin. By and featuring Hanno Leichtmann and Nils Ostendorf. Both are seasoned musicians with eventful careers who operate within very different artistic spheres. One of them, Hanno Leichtmann, is a veteran—and remains to this day a pioneer—of the electronic music scene that has developed in Germany’s capital since the years following the fall of the Berlin Wall, thanks to projects such as Static, the Trio Groupshow, and countless collaborations. The other, Nils Ostendorf, plays a trumpet whose capabilities are expanded through the use of various devices. He comes more from the world of contemporary jazz and has been a sought-after musician and composer on theater stages for years. 

Hanno Leichtmann and Nils Ostendorf both use—at different times of the day, in rapid succession—a recording studio in the Wedding district filled with hand-picked instruments and equipment. When the two met at the same time in that studio in May 2026, the plan was actually just to record a series of tracks for a release by Chromacolor, another solo project by Hanno Leichtmann. It all went faster than planned. In the end, they still had some studio time together. The result was a completely unplanned, 60-minute-long improvisation. All recorded in real time. The six tracks featured here were created through precise and decisive edits to the improvised and recorded material. Without any overdubs added afterward. 

The result is music that is open, exploratory, and not bound exclusively to any one genre. It has no qualms about engaging with the world of tonality and musical figuration. The boundaries and overlaps between ambient and jazz, free improvisation and musique concrète are blurred and constantly renegotiated. All the semantics and moods found here are, in principle, unstable. Every state reached is transitory. One thing leads to another. We perceive and imagine spaces of possibility that are becoming increasingly rare in the material world. Ignore The Machine’s debut is the first release on Hanno Leichtmann’s new label, Semen Contra. It is available exclusively as a limited-edition CD. Each release includes an art print from the label head’s extensive image library." - Christoph Gurk