12k is very happy to welcome Uwe Zahn, aka Arovane, to the roster. Arovane, a well-respected artist in the field, hailing from within the German countryside, has been active since the early 2000s beginning with releases on City Centre Offices and DIN in the heyday of the IDM and microsound years. He has since gone on to release work with n5MD, Pure Magnetik, and A Strangely Isolated Place, among others. With Reihen he takes his characteristic pointillist synthetic structures and impeccable sound design and lays them in a web of fagility, decay and etherealism that feels like new a new direction for Zahn.

Reihen came about in the spring of 2021 as Zahn was experimenting with a specific grouping of small devices and effects, creating asynchronous loops and working to no specific tempo. The idea of time without time, chance and inaccuracies came together strongly within this limited framework he had set up. As Zahn himself states: “There are microstructures created. Noises between the tones. Raw, intermodulated oscillators amplified and distorted, rushing and crackling, silence and erupting cascades of sound. That was the foundation of the album.” 

Reihen unearths a wistfullness and longing not often heard in Arovane’s more puncated and rhythmic works, but an area he has certainly explored since his last release Wirkung (Pure Magnetik). There is a dust and melancholy that moves away from his more precise, metallic textures of before. Reihen finds a comfortable home within 12k, echoing back to the synthetic-tinged days of the label’s erlier years while creating a tacile, intimate world amid the machines.