Headliner takes a trip down to the London home of L-Acoustics to check out L-Acoustics Creations, where a small audience are given the chance to entirely unplug and hear the UK premiere playback of The Next Billion Years by Robot Koch, reworked by his own mind-massaging ambient project, Foam and Sand.
If you’re not familiar with Robot Koch, he’s a Berlin-originating artist who now resides in Los Angeles, and a man Headliner has dubbed a “transcendent trailblazer” in the past. In fact, the BBC’s Bobby Friction commented that his music "sounds like artificial intelligence discovering religion”.
If an audience listening to his album with their eyes closed and the lights turned down in the quaintest part of London sounds niche, try some of his other projects on for size: he has even toured planetariums to perform an immersive Full Dome Live Show with 3D surround sound and 360 visuals.
Julie Blore-Bizot, director of brand and communications at L-Acoustics Creations, was kind enough to give the full technical rundown of the event – after which Headliner was, of course, fully sold and salivating at the prospect of hearing this new music through such stunning speakers.
“L-Acoustics Creations has been hosting intimate listening events since pre-pandemic, and resumed since restrictions were lifted,” she explains.
“We connected with Robot Koch around the Pitchblack Playback premiere of Jon Hopkins’ Music for Psychedelic Therapy in our immersive sound space in Los Angeles, which mirrors our London environment.
"That conversation led to mutual discovery and then collaboration around the global premiere of The Next Billion Years. We are moved by both the simplicity and depth of this sonically enveloping album which we are fond of describing as ‘a soothing blanket for the soul’.”