Exclusive video premiere of ‘Goodbye Düsseldorf’ by the Osnabrück-based duo Sankt Otten.

The duo of Stephan Otten and Oliver Klemm—better known as Sankt Otten—have always approached their synth-heavy craft with the precision of watchmakers and the curiosity of cosmic cartographers. Now, after a quiet stretch since 2022’s ‘Symmetrie und Wahnsinn,’ they return with ‘Tote Winkel,’ the latest chapter in a loosely geometric, deeply textural series of LPs. It’s one of two new full-lengths coming in June 2025, and it might just be their most intuitively constructed release yet.

Premiering today, ‘Goodbye, Düsseldorf’ is a wistful, slow-blooming transmission—both a farewell and a love letter to the city that helped define a half-century of German electronic music. Anchored by weightless arpeggios and analog melancholy, the track feels like a memory rendered in soft-focus VHS. There’s no irony in the title, no disdain—only an abstracted reverence, as if the ghosts of Kraftwerk and Neu! were dissolving gently into the mist over the Rhine.

Much of ‘Tote Winkel’ was recorded at Mühle der Freundschaft, a studio tucked away in Bad Iburg, where a treasure trove of vintage synthesizers and outmoded machinery waited to be coaxed back into voice. But instead of succumbing to nostalgia, Sankt Otten chose to manipulate and remap these familiar sounds, blending Düsseldorf pulses with pastoral ambience and Berlin School spirals. Many of the tracks, including this one, emerged from live improvisations—an intuitive approach that lends the album a surprising warmth and looseness.

‘Goodbye, Düsseldorf’ suggests that Sankt Otten aren’t closing doors—they’re peering through them, into fogged-up alleyways of memory and possibility. The video, equally hushed and elegiac, traces decaying structures and passing landscapes in slow, unbroken motion. It’s a meditation on time and architecture—on what remains when the lights flicker out.