New and exciting music is something I look for every day, from the moment I wake up till I inevitably fall asleep. The only issue: there isn’t always time to write about something when it’s found. More often, new discoveries are included in an unklar mixtape, piling up until there’s finally time to offer them a deserved attention. This is one of those moments — you’re going to read about the first album from Düsseldorf-based DJ and producer BORGBORG.
While at STAUB #142 this summer, was gonna head to the garden when one of my friends insisted I “give this DJ a chance” before leaving MDF. Well, my friend was definitely right. Behind the decks was BORGBORG, closing the event and somehow managing to make an entire audience applaud not once, but several times during the set. And no, I don’t think it was only her friends.
There was something almost alien about BORGBORG’s presence — and I mean that in a very positive way. Her eyes remained absorbed by the music-emitting machines throughout, contributing to an outer-space atmosphere.
At the end, I had the pleasure of meeting her and discovered an equally amazing person. We’ve been in contact since then, and now I can finally write a bit about her music.
Loveletter is BORGBORG’s first album. “Kein-Techno [not-techno],” she told me, and I replied, “Das Label kein-Techno, das du ihm gegeben hast, macht mich jetzt noch neugieriger.” [The ‘not-techno’ label you gave it makes me even more curious].”
And my instinct was right.
Loveletter is spacey, modal, dreamy, wavy. A journey through musical synapses connecting pleasure centers in a harmonic way. Intrinsec rhythms, strange beautiful textures, and enough movement make the whole thing feel physical and introspective at the same time. At moments, I even hear fragments that remind me of my native folklore.
Maybe that’s why I see the album as a Loveletter to music itself — considering the plenitude of reverberations incorporated into it, a place where sounds don’t have to belong to one particular genre.
My personal favorites are Photinia [Original + Fractal Void Remix], Aerial View At Night and Looking Northwest [I’d call the last Atonal style]. But the one that really stayed with me is LADA’s remix of Mercy — LADA being the project of Lars Hemmerling + Dasha Rush, two of my favorite artists.
Photinia and Mercy (LADA Remix) already found their way into unklar mixtapes #044.
BORGBORG is also part of Fractal Void. Her sound moves somewhere between techno, ambient, industrial textures and fractured electronics — heavy, strange and physical, but never quite predictable.
Loveletter, BORGBORG’s debut album, was released in 2026 via About Repetition.