hackedepicciotto – Wiederbelebung
“Wiederbelebung” — German for resurgence — is the lead single from LICHTUNG, the new hackedepicciotto album due 10 July on Mute. It’s the first material from Alexander Hacke and Danielle de Picciotto since Hacke’s departure from Einstürzende Neubauten in April 2025. This is the first record the duo have made after ending fourteen years of nomadic living to settle on the outskirts of Berlin.
The album title translates as “clearing” — a gap in the forest where light comes through — and the duo use the word deliberately. “The album is called LICHTUNG, which means a clearing, a place in which you can suddenly see the light in a dark forest, a place to rest”, they explain. “As the world seems to be spinning ever more quickly into a place of madness, being in this quiet place helps us think about how to deal with it all”. That sense of withdrawal and reorientation runs through the record’s premise: it was written and recorded in their new home studio, and composed entirely in German — a nod to place and language that gives LICHTUNG a distinct identity.
Musically, the album moves away from the repetitive drone structures that defined earlier hackedepicciotto work. The arrangements are more complex, the electronic range broader. Danielle de Picciotto returned to the piano after a long absence, bringing new melodic texture, while Hacke built out dense experimental electronic frameworks — drawing, reportedly, on memories of his Berlin boyhood in Lichtenrade. The shift feels considered rather than reactive; this is a duo reassessing what they want to sound like after a significant change in circumstances.
The album is out on Mute on limited-edition candy colour vinyl and CD. I’m drawn to the deliberateness of it all — the language choice, the return to piano, the move away from drone — and “Wiederbelebung” makes a persuasive case that the change of setting has genuinely shifted something.
