Wabi Sabi

Though primarily recognized through his Pluramon output, the German musician Markus Schmickler issued a lone 1997 solo project under the Wabi Sabi moniker via the A-Musik imprint. Active within Cologne’s fertile experimental community alongside Mouse on Mars, Nonplace Urban Field, Air Liquide, Mike Ink, and the A-Music, Electro Bunker, and Karaoke Kalk labels, Schmickler ranks among the more formally trained figures helping elevate the circle’s profile. Having studied electronic composition, he joined fellow students Carsten Shulz (aka C-Shulz), Frank Dommert, and Georg Odijk in the late-’80s ensembles Pol and Kontakta—two loosely structured experimental and improvisational units that echoed the exploratory ethos of Can, the city’s most infamous sonic pioneers.

Subsequent years brought a steady stream of electro-acoustic releases issued on Mille Plateaux under the Pluramon alias and, as Wabi Sabi, on Odijk’s A-Musik label, each exploring differing degrees of abstraction and earning widespread critical notice. Schmickler’s Kaspar-Hauser studios, whose name alludes to the early-19th-century foundling later portrayed by Werner Herzog in the 1974 film The Mystery of Kaspar Hauser, occupy a converted warehouse on the urban periphery. The facility itself mirrors his approach: amorphous clusters of seemingly inert, randomly generated sound are reshaped into compelling ambient and electro-acoustic settings that occasionally incorporate rhythmic pulses.