Daniel de Picciotto and Alexander Hacke have been pivotal figures in experimental music in their home city of Berlin going back decades. Hacke has long been a member of pioneering industrial band Einstürzende Neubauten and de Picciotto was a co-founder of traveling electronic music festival the Love Parade. Both have also been members of influential post-punk band Crime & the City Solution. These creative endeavors would be enough to secure their place in music history but anyone involved in the world of art and creative work knows you cannot rest on your laurels forever and de Picciotto and Hacke have both worked in film scoring, various musical projects and in the case of de Picciotto a writer of both a memoir (The Beauty of Transgression published in 2011 about de Picciotto’s early years in Berlin) and graphic novels (We Are Gypsies Now: A Graphic Diary from 2015 about the travails of trying to find a place to settle as artists when Berlin seemed to begin to be unaffordable; Die heitere Kunst der Rebellion – in English The Cheerful Art of Rebellion published in German in 2021 covering her Berlin years 1987-1995). Hacke and Picciotto have also released solo albums all worth exploring including de Picciotto’s affecting 2021 LP The Element of Love.
Several years back Hacke and de Picciotto established hackedepicciotto as a vehicle for their musical collaboration and their multimedia shows as touring artists has consistently brought fascinating narratives and visceral performances to cities around the world. In 2021 the respected Mute Records label released the latest hackedepicciotto album The Silver Threshold. The album is a showcase for what the project has been steeped in for years while also a fine example of pushing aesthetics and exploring sonic and thematic possibilities across eleven tracks, each a marvel of expanding stylistic experiments while commenting on having lived and traveled across continents and truly conjuring a sense of place and time while using sense memory and psychological states and sharp cultural observations as raw material for composition.
I recently had a chance to discuss The Silver Threshold with hackedepicciotto in depth through the use of modern technology to bridge the gap between Berlin and Colorado. Our conversation about symbolism, themes, the challenges of modern culture for creative life and more with any luck flowed well even for the listener as much as it felt to on my end. And if fortune favors us further hackedepicciotto will get to tour more extensively in the year ahead to bring this unique album and their other work to life in their inimitable and always engaging manner. Listen to the interview on Bandcamp and check out The Silver Threshold and other hackedepicciotto also on Bandcamp linked directly below as is the project’s website.
Queen City Sounds and Art 
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