There is a particular kind of musical education that happens in the dark — at night, through a radio speaker, in a bedroom, in a city that does not yet know what it is producing. Asmus Tietchens received his in Hamburg in the late 1950s, when as a child he tuned to the Norddeutsche Rundfunk's late-night transmissions and heard, for the first time, the electronic compositions of Karlheinz Stockhausen and Gottfried Michael Koenig. What he heard was not music in any sense the world around him recognized — it was sound organized according to principles that had no commercial application, no emotional address, no intention to please. He did not know what to do with this experience except to keep having it. By 1965, at eighteen, he had begun making his own experiments with tape loops, electronic instruments, and concrete sound materials. He had no teachers. He had no theoretical training. What he had was a precise idea of what music could be, arrived at entirely through the transmissions of the night.

That idea — which Tietchens has pursued through more than five decades of work and would eventually name "absolute music" — is inseparable from a philosophical orientation that arrived alongside it. In 1968, he encountered Emil Cioran's Lehre vom Zerfall, the Romanian-French philosopher's merciless demolition of all political, philosophical, and spiritual systems. For Tietchens, Cioran's radical skepticism — his refusal to substitute one demolished system with another, his insistence on confronting the void without consolation — mapped directly onto what he was attempting in sound. Music, for Tietchens, would be the art that makes no claims beyond itself: no narrative, no conventional emotion, no program. He has returned to Cioran repeatedly across his career, quoting from his essays in album liner notes and eventually, in 2018, releasing Leere und Zerfall — a CD of Tietchens reading from Cioran's texts accompanied by minimal electronics. The connection is not decorative. It is structural.

The career that followed this dual formation was eccentric by any measure. In the 1970s Tietchens met producer Okko Bekker, a Hamburg-based composer whose connections to the outer edges of the German scene included a contribution to the Cluster & Eno album in 1977. With Bekker's assistance, Tietchens recorded work that caught the attention of Peter Baumann of Tangerine Dream, who produced his 1980 debut. Four albums for Sky Records followed — more accessible, commercially oriented by the standards of what came before and after, though still bearing the formal idiosyncrasy that would define him. The decisive turn came in 1984 with Formen Letzer Hausmusik, recorded for Nurse With Wound's United Dairies label: the first clear statement of the abstract, collage-based direction that has governed his work ever since. Since then — Staalplaat, Korm Plastics, Die Stadt, Line, and dozens more — the output has been continuous, uncompromising, and almost entirely indifferent to fashion.

Asmus Tietchens

Secret Thirteen Mix 113 does not present Tietchens' own music. It opens, instead, his library — the records that shaped him, that he returns to, that constitute the private canon from which his practice has been built. The temporal span is extraordinary: from Charles Ives' Central Park In The Dark, composed in 1906, to Taylor Deupree's Haze It May Be from 2006 — a century of recorded music compressed into a single sequence that reveals, more clearly than any biography, how Tietchens hears. This is not the catholic generosity of a selector who wants to please a crowd. It is the precise testimony of someone who has spent sixty years identifying, with forensic patience, exactly what matters in music and why.

The selection opens with the oldest material and moves forward in time, but its internal logic is not chronological — it is formal. Ives' Central Park, composed without electronics using nothing but conventional orchestral instruments in overlapping, independent collage strands, appears here not as a piece of American classical music but as a prophecy: the first evidence that musical space could be organized by collage rather than narrative, three decades before Pierre Schaeffer formalized the same insight as musique concrète. Tietchens hears it this way, and says so plainly. Stockhausen's Studie II (1953) then marks the moment when that possibility becomes formally realized in the electronic medium — the official beginning of the lineage Tietchens entered through a bedroom radio a decade later.

What follows is less predictable. Link Wray's Ace Of Spades (1958), Sandy Nelson's Let There Be Drums (1961), Jet Harris and Tony Meehan's Diamonds (1963) — three pieces from the earliest years of rock and roll that Tietchens isolates not for their genre identity but for their formal properties: radical minimalism (Wray), strict reduction to rhythm and pioneering use of overdubbing (Nelson), the structural anomaly of the drum solo at a moment when such things were genuinely uncommon (Jet Harris). This is not nostalgia. It is the analytical attention of someone who listens to Link Wray the same way he listens to Stockhausen — searching for the formal logic that makes the sound inevitable rather than arbitrary. The pop and the avant-garde share, in Tietchens' hearing, the same quality of structural necessity.

Cluster's Sowiesoso (1976) arrives with an explicit declaration — Tietchens has always disliked Krautrock, "too spacy, too trippy," but recognizes Cluster as the exception: electronic music that was genuinely remote from those banalities. This is significant coming from a Hamburg composer operating in the same era and territory. Where many German contemporaries looked to cosmic expansion and psychedelic gesture, Tietchens and Cluster were oriented toward something colder, more formal, less interested in transcendence than in the internal logic of sound. The microsound and digital glitch era that follows — Oval's Textuell (1994), Kozo Inada's e[2] (2002), Gregory Büttner's Agd, Alva Noto and Opiate's Opto File 1 (2001), Taylor Deupree's Haze It May Be (2006) — represents the moment when Tietchens' aesthetic found a generation of practitioners working in the same cold, abstract register. Büttner in particular is a Hamburg-based sound artist who has collaborated directly with Tietchens — their shared city a common context for the kind of unaccommodating work both pursue.

Asmus Tietchens in the studio in 1980, listening to the master of Biotop

The closing choice is Carl Orff's Pater Peccavi from 1974 — an excerpt from De Finis Temporum Comoedia, Orff's final work, and the one piece in his entire catalogue where he uses electronics. Tietchens is emphatic about what should be forgotten (Carmina Burana, dismissed as simple pop songs) and what should be remembered. This is the characteristic gesture of the entire mix: the refusal to accept received hierarchies, the insistence on hearing things for what they formally are rather than what they are supposed to represent. Georgia O'Keeffe's abstract sculpture Abstraction stands as a fitting parallel — creating, like this music, a nostalgic whirl somewhere deep in the subconsciousness, merging complex emotions, memories and future visions into something that cannot be easily named or dismissed. This is what a personal canon produces when it belongs to a mind as rigorous as Tietchens': not a survey of important music, but a map of sixty years of listening — a map that turns out to be more revealing, and more strange, than any autobiography.