Sieren - Emergence (2025)

Early into Emergence, the forthcoming LP from Sieren, a.k.a. German musician, photographer, and field recordist Matthias Frick (R&S, Ki Records, Project Mooncircle), Frick pulls a time capsule off the shelf and smashes it across his synthesizers. If you squint midway through “Eclipse,” the record’s second track, you can practically see moment the shards start to fly: what starts as a chilled-out house-music workout suddenly cracks open into a universe of ‘90s rave nostalgia, complete with neck-snapping snare drums and acidic synth stabs. It’s a remarkable moment, and it doubles as a neat encapsulation of Emergence—here, Frick puts a million dance-music histories and possible futures into conversation, both honoring and discarding timelines in the process.

In his music, Frick has made a practice of this highly particular kind of historiography, folding universes in on themselves, twisting sounds and styles into shapes that are at once alien and comfortingly familiar. Frick first self-released music as Sieren over a decade ago, back in 2011, but his music has long stretched towards the past: in the mid-aughts, his productions dipped into the sun-kissed sounds of trance, and in the first half of the 2010s, he donned his current alias and fell in with the dreamy world of post-dubstep, which is itself a veritable constellation of sounds, ideologies, and genres. That approach—a kitchen-sink attitude towards styles bound together by a near-uniform focus on heart-on-sleeve electronics—holds throughout Emergence, a remarkable collection of emotive and playful dancefloor cuts.

Writing about his previous EP, 2024’s Serenity, Frick—an avid photographer—drew a line between his visual and sonic arts. “In a way,” he wrote, his preferred sounds “resemble the aesthetics I’m trying to go for when taking photos: either a bit oversaturated or a bit washed out and faded.” In his photography, Frick frequently blurs the lines between the organic and the digital: mountains and smartphones and mirrors cast in dialogue with each other, plazas and oceans stretching into infinity, million-colored vistas as seen through train windows. His work is both intimate and reserved; the distance is the point, but so is the warmth.

Scan through Emergence and you’ll find something similar: familiar idioms tilted slightly askew and blasted with sunlight. The sounds on display here—5-a.m. ambience, world-weary breakbeats, sun-soaked and delirious downtempo, late-’90s hardcore breaks spiraling towards the stars—are perhaps less important than the almost psychedelic amount of joy here, with each track working towards some kind of understated jubilee. Throughout the record’s ebbs and flows, Frick finds something both familiar and new, gesturing towards all sorts of dancefloor histories even as he points towards a calmer future.

“Fields,” a four-minute quiet-storm of a track, sits right at the middle of Emergence, and it feels like a real skeleton key here: reverb-drenched trance synths stretching towards the sky atop a sepia-tinged low-end, making for a sound that is both immediate and nostalgic. All the while, a million microscopic drums patter away underfoot, keeping things moving without lending unnecessary heft. This is head-in-the-clouds dance music at its finest: it wouldn’t be out of place on a mid-aughts IDM compilation, but crank the bassbins and you might just make the dancefloor float a few inches off the ground. “Within,” the LP’s final track, takes those same ideas—a top-line that floats above a barely present low-end, suggesting infinities with just a few notes—and pushes it ever further into the sky. Listening to this feels like looking out of a plane window and seeing nothing but the oceans that fills so many of Frick’s photography: the quietude of the thing just goes to underline its sheer scale, with each synth loop feeling like a lapping wave so many miles below.

Emergence is the sound of dance-music lifer taking umpteen idioms and casting them into the unknown, casting his every move in an unmistakably sepia tinge. This is the result of a life spent with beat tapes, headphone sessions, and club nights alike; any distinctions between the three, it seems, are an exercise in out-and-out pedantry. As with Serenity before it, and Frick’s photography and productions before that, this is a release about feeling above all else: neither exactly “club” nor “listening” music, but instead something that could sit comfortably in either universe thanks to sheer depth of emotion. Here, Frick imagines dance music as a quiet and joyous thing, each new texture and idea landing with a quiet assurance. Dance music has long promised utopias; here, Frick is kind enough to sketch one out.

- Album bio by Michael McKinney