Sieren

Matthias Frick first self-released music as Sieren - his mother’s maiden name - 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. He released music on labels such as R&S Records and Christian Löffler’s Ki Records.
That melting-pot approach is clear in his new releases on imprint Friends of Friends, a potent distillation of umpteen styles that nevertheless feels like something entirely new: it’s 8-a.m. rave-ups and 11 p.m. ambience; it’s 1992 and 2025; it’s both sides of the Atlantic with somewhere in between thrown in for good measure; it’s field recordings ripped from a club night that never happened.

Spend enough time with Frick’s photography and it may start to feel like a pre-worn photo album. His pictures, which focus on the natural world but coat it in that washed-out aesthetic, harbor a quiet kind of beauty: the midday sun glimmering on the ocean, murals held against wide-open skies. It should come as little surprise that Frick is an avid traveler, and his blissed-out atmospheres would make it a solid companion for a sunrise hike or a starlit night at the beach.