Playback 0037

Join us at Bar Laika on September 16, from 7pm for the thirty-seventh edition of Playback with Midgar Records founder Severja, who will play the entire Midgar label catalog ahead of his club set at Public Records on September 18.

Midgar founder Severja is less interested in genres than in the strange gravitational pull between them. In his sets, sounds that might seem unrelated on paper are allowed to circle one another until their differences begin to blur: low-slung rhythms and weightless atmospheres, soundsystem pressure and psychedelic detail, skeletal drums, submerged melodies, synthetic organisms flickering at the edge of perception. There is a sense of constant mutation. Rhythms collide and dissolve, familiar forms arrive slightly warped, and unexpected juxtapositions reveal affinities between records that seemingly have little business sharing the same space. Rather than smoothing over those differences, Severja plays with the friction between them, letting one musical language contaminate the next. The result is less a journey through genres than a temporary ecosystem with its own internal logic.

That instinct has long found a home in Midgar, the label and platform Severja founded in Berlin in 2014, with releases from Forest Drive West, Wata Igarashi, Priori, and Polygonia, among others. It extends to HyperrTerra, his open-air series at Berlin’s Backsteinboot, now a fixture of the city’s summer calendar, and his involvement with Norway’s Monument festival. His visual work travels just as widely: wander through almost any festival and chances are some of the shirts in the crowd bear designs made for Midgar or one of the many musical projects he has worked with.

Playback is a series of informal listening events curated by Kamran Sadeghi where record labels, musicians, composers, and producers feature recordings from their catalog, and premiere album pre-releases, archives, and other rarities.