Listening to aktenzeichen_T’s new EP, “Midnight Between Lagrange Points”, feels less like putting on a record and more like unsealing a classified file. The artist’s name, German for “case file number,” seems to promise a kind of cold, bureaucratic evidence, and the Leipzig producer delivers—but the subject of this file is the messy, beating heart of human conflict. A case file rendered in kick drums and fractured snares.
This is a protest EP, but you won’t find any slogans here. Instead, you get the feeling of protest. The techno foundation is a cold, steel-girder framework, relentless and unfeeling like the machinery of war it decries. But across this grid, agitated breakbeats skitter and glitch, feeling like a nervous system fighting against its own programming. It’s the sound of teeth gritting in the dark, a tension so palpable it almost has a smell—like ozone and hot circuits just before a power surge. It made me think of the frantic clicking of a Geiger counter, a rhythm you never want to hear, repurposed here as a desperate dance track.
By stripping away the words, aktenzeichen_T bypasses the intellect and aims straight for the pulse. The tracks don’t tell you to be for unity and peace; they create a sonic space so fraught with mechanical tension that peace feels like the only logical escape. It’s the sound of a system trying to compute the illogical math of human hatred and finding only error messages in the rhythm.
The EP doesn’t offer a destination of unity, but rather plants you firmly in that disquieting, precarious ‘midnight’—that balancing point where gravity could pull you either way. Which direction do you fall?
