The thing about creative work is not that easy: nothing is more beautiful than creating a new world out of nothing. And nothing can be more impossible when you’re stuck in a blockage. That’s what happened to Sascha Ring, better known as Apparat. In 2019 he released his last solo album LP5, which was nominated for a Grammy, followed in 2022 by the celebrated MORE D4TA together with Modeselektor. But somehow writer’s block crept in afterwards. Creating new music? A challenge that suddenly no longer seemed so easy for the otherwise busy and productive artist. How do you deal with a crisis like this? It’s best to learn to get your own urge for perfection under control. Between March and September last year, Ring set a goal of coming up with a song idea every day, no matter how unfinished it might be.
And the plan worked: He worked out eleven of these sketches together with his long-time musical companion Philipp Johann Thimm and other colleagues. A HUM OF MAYBE is now the name of his sixth album and combines everything that we have come to love about Apparat’s music over the last two and a half decades: Ring’s longing, fragile vocals and experimental pop, glitchy electronica, ambient moments and of course the play with techno elements.
A HUM OF MAYBE is positioned somewhere between a retreat and a dance floor – or do we find a retreat on the dance floor? Ring manages to never slip into kitsch, despite great emotions, precisely because of the fiddly sound worlds. In its strongest moments (and there are a few of them on the album, such as “Tilth” with the Syrian-American performer KÁRYYN or the opener “Glimmerine”, to name just two) the songs achieve a kind of transcendence, floating above things and taking us with them. Goodbye crisis!
This review appears in Musikexpress 3/2026.
