Experimental multi-instrumentalist, composer, filmmaker, and author Adi Gelbart shares the ingredients to his new album, Liquid & Flesh.
Self-taught Berliner multi-instrumentalist, composer, filmmaker, and author Adi Gelbart has sculpted a veritable litany of works. These span across albums, live productions, short films, and a book. These works etch out his unsettling, liminal universe, echoing the naïvety of 1960s space-age exotica and the discomfort of early European micropolyphonic electronica-concrète; all slathered over dystopian bunny sci-fi and jazz noir.
The unique combination of these omnipresent elements makes Adi Gelbart’s songs and animations instantly recognisable. With his latest album, Liquids & Flesh (2025), his first release on his label, he discusses Dystopian bunnies, opening portals, and getting people to sit down and listen at Berlin’s Berghain.
I remember being introduced to you at a screening of your paranoiac alien vegetable film, the one with Felix Kubin narrating, sometime in the early 2010s.
Vermin! It was my first narrative audiovisual work and the first to deal with human extinction, a theme that started as a sci-fi obsession, and is perhaps soon coming to fruition in our actual reality. Funnily, it was screened in the American Library of Congress (as part of a symposium on astrobiology). The soundtrack was released on Felix Kubin’s label, Gagarin Records, later.
After that, the “Alpha” cycle started, right? I recognised a constant narrative appearing in your work after I started to follow you more closely. It seemed I was seeing chapters of the same book for the next run of shows, right up until now, especially with the Alpha computer character that has become a big part of your live shows.
Yes, in 2018, with my novel Egglike, which, among other things, introduces the character of the living computer Alpha. It also deals with human extinction and the concept of love. All of my works from 2015-2021 are inspired by the themes of my book and vice versa.
For my 2016 LP, Preemptive Musical Offerings to Satisfy Our Future Masters (Gagarin Records), I spent a week recording historical synths in WORM studios in Rotterdam to create the combination of acoustics and electronics that I like so much. This album was inspired by the process of writing Egglike.
During the COVID years, I saw you on stage with the Alpha at HKW (Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin). That was a huge moment, seeing you there with a string quartet. You told me that it had been a goal of yours.
Yes, I composed Poems by Alpha for a live string quartet (KNM Berlin) and electronics, based on poems written by Alpha, the computer I programmed into life. This was before the days of ChatGPT (it was composed in 2019 but postponed due to COVID). The computer was not imitating humans. It was a proud computer expressing its musing based on random computer functions. The computer only wrote the lyrics, and I composed the music.
I drew inspiration from my lifelong favorites – Messiaen, Bartók, Debussy, Ravel, and John Cage – and instead of beats and synths for the foundations, the string quartet is the main focus, with the speech synthesizer singing on top. This program was also performed in Mexico City and at Berghain, where I intentionally performed it as a seated audience concert. I wanted people to come to the Berghain and sit down to listen.
The next live works outgrew even that, right? I missed the show with the big jazz band. Some kind of ritual was involved?
Yes, the live concert at the HKW in 2022 – The Portal Finally – A work I composed for a 13-piece big band, harp, harpsichord, and electronics. I got to pour all my Charles Mingus, Thelonious Monk, Ornette Coleman, and Duke Ellington love into this one. Some Olivier Messiaen inspiration too. The aim was to open the portal (which was a physical triangular screen above the stage) to communicate with the beyond.
We used mystical frequencies to open the portal at the end of the piece, but no one answered… I guess we are alone. (The piece explored the hypothesis of who is beyond the portal in four movements: Alien Civilization, another universe in the Multiverse, the outside of the Simulation, or God itself). I had some of the best jazz musicians in Berlin perform this. This was recorded and will come out next year on my new label.
This is a good moment to discuss the characters and visual worlds you’ve created to accompany your music through film clips, which also make their way into your live shows. They rely heavily on repeating symbols of plush toy religious mania.
They have a terrifying hauntology to them as well because of how much they resemble stop-motion childhood classics like Jack Frost [Jules Bass and Arthur Rankin Jr., (1979)] or Alice in Wonderland [Dallas Bower (1949). Tell me about the iconography you’ve developed.
Somehow, I’ve created my own branch of mysticism over the years. The Manta-Ray god, the bunnies, the egg symbol. Some of them have specific meanings which I developed in Egglike, but more than anything, these are tools to open the mind to a wider level of existence.
I was never drawn to learning an existing branch of mysticism or religion, but I’ve always been fascinated by the power of mystical aspiration. This is all to help me remember my smallness in the universe, which is something I find beautiful. There’s something so much bigger around us, and these mystical elements allow me to connect with it on an emotional level.
How the specific symbols connect with the music happens on a very intuitive level, so I can’t tell you more about that without bullshitting. While I do not like religion, I find that artists who are deeply religious–with Olivier Messiaen being a prime example–are able to reach out much further with their vision and imagination.
Liquids & Flesh has some more “pop” elements, if only by comparison to your previous albums. What influences were you drawing from, and what is different from the others?
The big difference is that I use vocals on all the tracks. I think it makes it somewhat more accessible. Since the Alpha project, I have found myself drawn to using a voice, whether it contains lyrics or just sounds. The warmth of this sound can only be achieved with a human voice. However, it’s a computer-generated voice, which takes it all to an uncanny place that I love.
If you ask what I want to say, I don’t really know what I’m trying to say with [Liquids & Flesh]. I’m basically just a medium for the messages I find inside my head, whatever gets sent into me from being a part of humanity on the one hand and a speck of nothing in the infinite universe on the other, and from bearing witness to the birth of our future machine masters right before our eyes.
As for influences, the real answer is that all the influences are now baked into my style. I don’t have specific influences when I work on a new album. To answer your question, I tried to look at the album and see which influences got into it,
The first albums I was obsessed with as a child were ELO’s Discovery [1979] and Time [1981]. I can see traces of their combination of vocoders, orchestra, and electronics in my current work, although my take is completely different. I love ELO. They’re one of the two great pop bands of all time. The Beatles being the other one.
Liquid & Flesh is a sampler’s delight, all the organ beat bank backing tracks. What are they from?
The electronic beats are from the drum machine Hammond Auto-vari 64. As always, I play all the instruments on the album, and I never sample other people’s music.