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This
bold new release by modular synth duo d’Voxx is their third on the DiN
imprint, having previously released Télégraphe (DiN58) & 1984
(DiN75) to much critical acclaim. To give it its full title - HERZOG: A
Retrospective by d’Voxx - sees Nino Auricchio and Paul Borg expanding
their sonic horizons with musical interpretations of the five films
legendary German film director Werner Herzog made between 1972 and 1987
with the mercurial actor Klaus Kinski.
Needless to say, this gives the album a very cinematic feel, where the modular systems that are at the core of their sound are still very much present but often in supporting roles around which the genre-bending five tracks rise and fall. Their ambitious sound worlds incorporate elements of prog, techno, rock, field recordings, and even a sample of a 1911 opera on, where else but the track Impossible Monolith, which references the epic film Fitzcarraldo. The duo state that these tracks do not attempt to score the films but rather to inhabit their territories: the fevered conquistador descending into megalomania; Woyzeck ground to psychological dust by institutional cruelty; Fitzcarraldo's monumental folly; Nosferatu's ancient weariness; the slave trader's trajectory through exploitation and dissolution.
This third outing from d’Voxx will delight and surprise their admirers in equal measure and once again proves that the DiN label never stands still but is constantly looking to push through the straitjacket of genre boundaries.
Needless to say, this gives the album a very cinematic feel, where the modular systems that are at the core of their sound are still very much present but often in supporting roles around which the genre-bending five tracks rise and fall. Their ambitious sound worlds incorporate elements of prog, techno, rock, field recordings, and even a sample of a 1911 opera on, where else but the track Impossible Monolith, which references the epic film Fitzcarraldo. The duo state that these tracks do not attempt to score the films but rather to inhabit their territories: the fevered conquistador descending into megalomania; Woyzeck ground to psychological dust by institutional cruelty; Fitzcarraldo's monumental folly; Nosferatu's ancient weariness; the slave trader's trajectory through exploitation and dissolution.
This third outing from d’Voxx will delight and surprise their admirers in equal measure and once again proves that the DiN label never stands still but is constantly looking to push through the straitjacket of genre boundaries.
credits
FreeForm Radio thanks Ian Boddy & DiN for a promo copy of this release.
released February 20, 2026
HERZOG: A Retrospective by d'Voxx
In the five films Werner Herzog made with Klaus Kinski between 1972 and 1987, we witness not collaboration but collision: two volatile temperaments locked in a creative struggle that yielded some of cinema's most unsettling meditations on power, obsession, and the dissolution of the civilised self. These are films that ask what remains when reason fails, when ambition exceeds all measure, when the jungle (literal or psychological) reclaims what we thought was ours.
HERZOG: A Retrospective does not attempt to score these films but to inhabit their territories: the fevered conquistador descending into megalomania; Woyzeck ground to psychological dust by institutional cruelty; Fitzcarraldo's monumental folly; Nosferatu's ancient weariness; the slave trader's trajectory through exploitation and dissolution. The sonic language deployed here, modular electronics meeting processed strings from the period these stories inhabit, seeks what Herzog himself called "ecstatic truth": not documentary accuracy but something deeper, achieved through what he termed "the voodoo of location."
The harmonic movement is deliberately constrained, often circling a single diminished chord as if unable to escape its own logic, a musical analogue to the closed systems of thought that trap Herzog's protagonists. Rhythms recall not just the pulse of techno but older patterns: military cadences, the regularity of scientific experiment, the measured tread of the condemned. The inclusion of a 1911 recording of Verdi's Rigoletto is no mere period decoration but a reminder that opera, that art form of impossible emotions made audible, haunts Herzog's vision as persistently as Caruso's voice haunted Fitzcarraldo's gramophone in the jungle.
What links these five films is their fascination with how civilised veneers crack under pressure: how quickly the dreamer becomes the fanatic, the man becomes the monster or the victim. Herzog's camera lingers on faces pushed to extremity, on landscapes that dwarf human ambition, on moments where only the image, only the sound, can convey what's happening to a consciousness under siege. And Kinski, for all his volatility, gave Herzog something irreplaceable: a willingness to be that extremity, to make visible the moment when the human cracks open.
This music asks for similar attention: not quick consumption but the focus Herzog demands, the willingness to sit with discomfort, to let patterns establish themselves before they mutate. From the fever dream of conquest to the ritualised violence of institutional power, from visionary grandeur to gothic isolation to the final reckoning with history's brutalities, these five pieces chart a descent that is also, somehow, an ascent into clarity. What remains is not resolution but resonance: the sound of ambitions that exceeded their means, of collaborations that survived their own volatility, of truths too ecstatic for comfortable consumption.
—Nino Auricchio and Paul Borg, 2025
HERZOG: A Retrospective by d'Voxx
In the five films Werner Herzog made with Klaus Kinski between 1972 and 1987, we witness not collaboration but collision: two volatile temperaments locked in a creative struggle that yielded some of cinema's most unsettling meditations on power, obsession, and the dissolution of the civilised self. These are films that ask what remains when reason fails, when ambition exceeds all measure, when the jungle (literal or psychological) reclaims what we thought was ours.
HERZOG: A Retrospective does not attempt to score these films but to inhabit their territories: the fevered conquistador descending into megalomania; Woyzeck ground to psychological dust by institutional cruelty; Fitzcarraldo's monumental folly; Nosferatu's ancient weariness; the slave trader's trajectory through exploitation and dissolution. The sonic language deployed here, modular electronics meeting processed strings from the period these stories inhabit, seeks what Herzog himself called "ecstatic truth": not documentary accuracy but something deeper, achieved through what he termed "the voodoo of location."
The harmonic movement is deliberately constrained, often circling a single diminished chord as if unable to escape its own logic, a musical analogue to the closed systems of thought that trap Herzog's protagonists. Rhythms recall not just the pulse of techno but older patterns: military cadences, the regularity of scientific experiment, the measured tread of the condemned. The inclusion of a 1911 recording of Verdi's Rigoletto is no mere period decoration but a reminder that opera, that art form of impossible emotions made audible, haunts Herzog's vision as persistently as Caruso's voice haunted Fitzcarraldo's gramophone in the jungle.
What links these five films is their fascination with how civilised veneers crack under pressure: how quickly the dreamer becomes the fanatic, the man becomes the monster or the victim. Herzog's camera lingers on faces pushed to extremity, on landscapes that dwarf human ambition, on moments where only the image, only the sound, can convey what's happening to a consciousness under siege. And Kinski, for all his volatility, gave Herzog something irreplaceable: a willingness to be that extremity, to make visible the moment when the human cracks open.
This music asks for similar attention: not quick consumption but the focus Herzog demands, the willingness to sit with discomfort, to let patterns establish themselves before they mutate. From the fever dream of conquest to the ritualised violence of institutional power, from visionary grandeur to gothic isolation to the final reckoning with history's brutalities, these five pieces chart a descent that is also, somehow, an ascent into clarity. What remains is not resolution but resonance: the sound of ambitions that exceeded their means, of collaborations that survived their own volatility, of truths too ecstatic for comfortable consumption.
—Nino Auricchio and Paul Borg, 2025
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