Öd: eight recordless turntables, thirty-six minutes, one idea
Institut Für Feinmotorik return after more than a decade with six tracks of crackle, drone and limping techno, built on eight turntables that have no records on them.
BY JOLT Staff · OCT 13 2026 · 3 min readÖd sounds like a room full of machines breaking down on purpose. Institut Für Feinmotorik have been gone long enough that the return counts as news: their first proper release in well over a decade, last year's limited Adhesive Tape aside, out in October on Faitiche. Six tracks, one method, no tunes. They make no apology for any of that.
The group were most active from the late 1990s to the early 2010s, which makes Archivmaterial, Negemergenz, Penetrans and Abgegriffen documents from a specific stretch of German experimental music. Back then they could be filed with the no-input mixer players and the EMF manipulators: conceptual, dry, easier to describe than to hum. Their sound was already pared down to squeaks and sparse forms. Nothing on Öd suggests the decade away changed a note of how they work.
“making almost nothing out of almost nothing”
The instrument is the Octogrammoticum: an orchestra of eight turntables with no records on them, augmented by scraps and dregs of discarded objects. Everything here is built from that rig and a handful of looping effects. The poet Dagmara Kraus wrote the titles, and they read in German and English at once, so 'Stern An Engel Moll' and 'Red Lose Log Dies' are six words in one language and six in another, depending on what you bring to them. The album takes its name from the German öde, barren or boring, and Ödnis, wasteland. Rashad Becker mastered it, Tim Tetzner did the layout, and the collective's own summary of the method is 'making almost nothing out of almost nothing.'
Thirty-six minutes, almost no events. Crackles fall on scratchy technoid beats; boops arrive at oblique angles; a bass note fattens for a bar and goes thin again. The loops stretch like chewing gum before snapping back, and they never land in the same place twice. It is drone played as techno, and techno stripped back to the armature of drone. The tempo sits in limbo: quick enough to move a foot you did not give permission to, and too slow for any dance.
'Red Lose Log Dies' sets the weather: a cloud of crackle with those boops dropping through it onto the beats. 'Ruder Also In Den' is the one that moves, a lethargic four-to-the-floor with a scraping line doing a good impression of Tony Conrad's violin. 'Stern An Engel Moll' is the nervous one, the closest the record comes to tipping from tension into intensity.
This is for people who keep Graham Dunning records at home and read mastering credits. There are no tunes here, and the record makes no secret of it from the first bar. What it gives you is eight turntables with nothing on them, argued into a groove that holds for five or six minutes at a time. That is a narrower pleasure than it sounds, and a real one.
The back half is where it goes wrong. 'Bald Rose Sags Fast' is thin and carefully made, and so are 'Her Taut Flatter Tut' and 'Fuss Tags In Reuse'. Those three vary only the plumpness of the bass lines and of harmonies that are suggested and never allowed to arrive. The same held pattern comes round again and again. Scarcity is the point of the project, but by the closing track it has stopped producing tension and started producing sameness.
On a record this short, that flatness is expensive. What survives is three tracks worth the wait, and three that prove the method still holds and nothing more. Öd is good, and I mean that as a measurement: the first half earns it, the second half stops.
