DEADBEAR is the moniker of Berlin-based producer and electronic musician Nick Donovan. Donovan began experimenting with electronic music as part of a university 'laptop orchestra' and later making interactive software including being commissioned to build an app for CERN's Large Hadron Collider.

After the self-release his 2017 album ‘The Trees are Dancing’, 2019 sees DEADBEAR set to release a new artistic project and record ‘World Music Market’. The release is a concept record tied wholly to Berlin, vinyl and the migration of people and music. All profits will be going directly to charity, specifically projects that help integrate refugees into Western communities and develop new skills.

I wrote this new record over the course of several months after amassing a stack of vintage ‘World Music’ vinyl from my local Sunday flohmarkt. I would go to this one same stall every Sunday and pick up something incredible - discontinued runs of Middle East compilations, Nubian region samplers, one hit wonders from Yemen. After a while it became clear this collection needed to become more than just a Sunday listening experience. I knew I had to make a record out of it. ‘World Music Market’ collides styles and samples from 11 vinyl records (most pressed in the 50s and 60s) and 14 different countries. Korean Court music sits alongside Tibetan Folk, Syrian dances and Sudanese prayer songs. Encapsulating the spirit of Berlin through the context of electronic music, celebrations of multiculturalism and migration of people to Berlin from all corners of the world, ‘World Music Market’ is also a record that plays with set concepts of time and place.

Berlin is very much a place of coalescing cultures and coexisting, multiple temporalities and I wanted this record to give a real sense of those aspects. This project is not a vision of a multicultural utopia. Multiculturalism, just like the music on this record, juxtaposes multiple traditions, backgrounds and different sacred, or secular, practices in one space. Sometimes it works, sometimes it jars and creates tension or unexpected artefacts but the experience is the richer for it - and the ‘picture’ one of greater depth and colour. I feel this record differs from my past catalogue in production style and values as I wanted to maintain the unkept or slightly rough-around-edges nature of the recordings made 40-60 years ago.

I also wanted to challenge our constant search for authenticity with this album - especially in cultural areas of our present times. Exoticness, Otherness (with a capital o), authenticity; these are things that are inherently amorphous and flawed and playing with those ideas has been a big part of this record. I hope you enjoy the weird, wild ride :)