Defensive Acoustics

by AICHER

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François-Xavier Hubert Like a strange dream without beginning or end. Feels familiar?

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Includes unlimited streaming of Defensive Acoustics via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.
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1.	Ascertain ft. R. Rebeiro 03:36	buy track
2.	Harness Pleads ft. R. Rebeiro 04:19	buy track
3.	Servitude ft. R. Rebeiro 02:52	buy track
4.	An Exhausted Image 02:33	buy track
5.	Constriction (andereBaustelle Version) 02:26	buy track
6.	Defensive Acoustics 03:50	buy track
7.	Possessions 03:30	buy track

about

Debut under the AICHER moniker, Defensive Acoustics is a collection of recordings channeling a performance that was presented alongside R. Rebeiro in the worn basement of the Ishiguro Building, an aged and abandoned pharmaceutical store in Kanazawa, Japan in Feb. 2024. Reinterpreted and releasing November 7 on the honourable Downwards Records of Birmingham, England.

"Colossal industrial minimalism from Downwards on a sick debut album from AICHER who deploy sheet-metal percussion and immense bass weight like some ice-cold collab between Valentina Magaletti, Emptyset and Einstürzende Neubauten, captured in an abandoned warehouse in graphic monochrome.

AICHER is the work of longtime label veteran Liam Andrews (MY DISCO, EROS), with additional production from his MY DISCO spar Rohan Rebeiro — an experimental percussionist and erstwhile collaborator of Roland S. Howard and HTRK. Together, they make resoundingly coarse, bullish industrial musick, distilling fascinations with tone and space through eight gristly and darkly sublime cuts, sharpened by production from Boris Wilsdorf of Einstürzende Neubauten and Swans fame.

Through 8 cuts, Defensive Acoustics reveals a clammy touch of reverberant buzz and below-the-belt shudder with a creeping, sensual signature of authority that strongly reminds us of Alan Wilder’s Blasphemous Rumours-era sound design for Depeche Mode, stripped to absolute skeletal fire. Tectonic plates of sound are pushed to an extreme biting point in a sort of structural stress test that feels like an oil rig in action, or perhaps more acutely, junked at harbour.

We go from the lurching buckle of ‘Ascertain’ and bilious atonality of ‘Harness Pleads’, to the vertiginous scale of the title piece and the brutal momentum of ‘An Exhausted Image’ - almost collapsing under its own bass weight, while the pranging girders of ‘Constriction’ makes us think of that 101 version of ‘Stripped’ - propulsive, full of primal energy and clanging, clipped reverb. ‘Possessions’ ends the album with a passage of bleakly romantic ambience, a judicious emotive counterweight to the preceding gnarl.

Powerfully transfixing, heaviest possible gear."

— Boomkat

credits

released November 7, 2025

Written and produced by Liam Andrews
Recorded by Boris Wilsdorf, andereBaustelle, Berlin.
Mixed by Seth Manchester, Machines With Magnets, Pawtucket.
Mastered and cut by Rashad Becker, Clunk, Berlin.

Cover Photography by Mathieu Ball.
Distributed by Boomkat.

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about

AICHER Berlin, Germany

AICHER is the project of Copenhagen-based artist Liam Andrews.

Defensive Acoustics releases Nov. 7 on Downwards Records.

Bookings worldwide [email protected]

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