For the first time in six years, Barbara Morgenstern, pioneer of German-style electronic intimate pop, works on a new album. Her laptop sits on a shoebox, in the privacy of her home she finds first lines and harmonies: “I like to be alone,” one song begins. One by one, musicians join her. Intuitive ideas take shape. A window has opened. Arrangements, rehearsals, recordings follow. Step by step, the music enters public space, images are produced, videos, narratives. Questions arise: New beginning or back to the roots? New Biedermeier or tough political comment? The bigger the band, the riskier the booking. The more crisis-ridden the environment, the more comforting the music-making.
Sabine Herpich shows the creation of a pop album as a working process. Her view is as unpretentious as her protagonist, her quiet observation not interested in story and glamour, but in closeness and comprehension. We understand why someone works as an artist, even if it is never explained. Barbara Morgenstern shares what moves her: “Labour of love / for the rest of the earth / I’m more than certain / that this still has worth.”

To the sweeping sound of a sitar, thousands and thousands of dots orbit a kaleidoscopic centre, like the individual notes of a raga circle the keynote. Repeated graphic patterns blossom and crumble back into the mass. As traditional as the reference points for James Whitney's breathtaking visual music were, the realisation with early computer animation by his brother John Whitney was just as innovative.

Breathtakingly beautiful and precisely synchronised circles perform linear movements – sensual highs, but based on science. Electronica producer and science PhD Max Cooper has found the perfect visual fit for his euphoric and driving track in a geometrical principle described by Gerolamo Cardano in 1570 and in Mario Carrillo’s animation.

The multicoloured dotted record is on the turntable and spins, the handheld stroboscope emits its flashes of light. The mesmerising rain of confetti begins to the beat of the psychedelic organ krautrock celebrated by the Finnish Shogun Kunitoki quartet. A manual for home use that demonstrates how the picture disc, when used correctly, can sweep us off our feet acoustically and optically.

The beaches of Havana, splashing around, tender gestures between lovers, the sun glistening on the water, hips swaying to music. With this light-handed etude, Néstor Almendros delivers a shimmering testimony of post-revolutionary relaxation – and an early proof of his virtuosity as a cinematographer.
The film was made at ICAIC – and disappeared there, too. The national film art institute founded in 1959 by order of the new government saw no place for such neorealistic extravaganzas in the new Cuban cinema and issued a screening ban. Néstor Almendros left Cuba in 1961 to become a world-renowned cinematographer in the US and Europe. His name was expunged from the ICAIC filmography published in the book accompanying the 1974 Cuban retrospective in Leipzig.

Abstract organic drawings, wandering flocks of clouds and the surging sea give the “Impromptu opus 70” piano piece a visual body which refuses to take on a fixed form or pause. “Remous” embraces the undulations of Jacques Hétu’s erratic composition, twists perspectives and makes individual notes shimmer as brief reflections of light on the surfaces of deep darkness.

Jamila is nine, Rachel eleven and Faseeha twelve when they take their first steps into a new hip-hop culture. The Berlin girls meet at a rap project, become friends and take off with their Sisterqueens crew. This documentary follows them over four years through their daily life with parents, siblings and their unusual chosen hip-hop family, where they learn a lot about hook lines and even more about self-respect.
We watch the three at rehearsals, studio recordings and stage performances, where they counter the well-known gender clichés of rap with their own songs. They also discuss their experiences with racism and exclusion and turn what happens to them into rhymes. Faseeha tests the boundaries with other artistic forms of expression, Rachel thinks about what self-determination means to her, and Jamila witnesses a frightening incident that makes her doubt the sanity of the police. They formulate their ideas and questions about what it means to be themselves, always with humour and to the point.

Something is wrong. Something is completely wrong. With the sound and with the image. The notes are crooked, the piano lid squeaks, the movement falters. Corrections are needed to bring everything together in harmony and in tune with Johann Sebastian Bach’s beautiful music.
Six roles of painted toilet paper are worked on by human hands on an editing table, one after the other. The editing device consists of coloured building blocks and a few wooden sticks. It is a game, a trick, it’s entertainment. At the same time, the simple images on the film strip take us deep into the current events of our time. But the material resists sharply delineated representation. It soaks up the paint and blurs the boundaries. It tears. It is limited. Before the story can pick up speed, the roll is unspooled. Narrative is difficult in view of this situation. And yet animation artist Anna Samo manages, with a very light touch, to transform ambivalent feelings, confusion, rigidity and speechlessness into a work of hope and courage.

At first everything in this music video by the London duo Sculpture is two-dimensional. But better duck down while watching! On intricately composed levels of space, graphic elements whiz wildly past your eyes and broken beats whistle violently past your ears. Zyprazol is medicinal, a mind-expanding drug – just like the animation records made by Sculpture.