Preface

I began writing about Kickmusik roughly five years ago when I was finishing my Bachelors degree in Recorded Music at NYU. After experiencing several euphoric albeit transient moments with this emerging music, I began designing variations of Kickmusik in my head. Multiple discouraging attempts to re-create this music physically, however, urged me to seek a new life in Berlin, Germany, where a strong kick drum is not only omnipresent but celebrated (unfortunately almost exclusively in 4/4 time). I continued my research in secret, keeping my ears curious to any chance encounters with this new music but I refrained from writing. Much like the existentialist belief that ‘existence must precede essence,’ I concluded, in this circumstance, practice must precede principle - how could I write about a music that I had not yet created? 

From 2017 to 2019, I consciously searched for the Kickmusik sound and gathered a collection of tracks that embodied the exact genre I was imagining. Some tracks only contained a sequence or two of what I would deem ‘Kickmusik’ and other, often more obscure discoveries, very closely embodied the ethos of this music. At the end of this text, I will list a selection of these discoveries for reference, some of which are my own creations! A Spotify playlist link will also be added to this page shortly. 

Within the vast and vague universe of Experimental music, we have no shortage of sub-sub-sub-genres and niches of weirdos who celebrate them. This is one of them, in perhaps its earliest documented stage, ready to be examined, experimented, and disseminated into the musical stratosphere.  

**The below copy of ‘Kickmusik’ is a rough final draft.