Alexander Hacke and Danielle de Picciotto on settlement, German poetry, and the emotional weight of departure

Transmission 386: Interview with Alexander Hacke and Danielle Depicciotto

Lichtenrade is a suburb on the southern edge of Berlin that gentrification never quite reached, a quiet outlier of fields and old streets that the city’s decades of transformation left largely intact. The name derives from Middle High German: lichten, meaning clear or luminous, and rode, from the verb roden, to clear forest. First recorded in 1375 in the Landbuch of Emperor Charles IV as Lichtenrode, it translates, literally, as “luminous clearing.” It is also where Alexander Hacke grew up.

Title: LICHTUNG
Artist: hackedepicciotto
Release Date: 2026-07-10
Genres: Ambient, Avant-garde, Electronica, Experimental Music
Label: Mute Records
Description: hackedepicciotto interview on LICHTUNG (Mute Records, July 10): Alexander Hacke and Danielle de Picciotto on nomadic life, German lyrics, and liberation.

Hacke joined Einstürzende Neubauten in 1980, at the age of 14, and remained a member for 45 years, until his departure in 2025. His partner, Danielle de Picciotto, an American artist and musician who moved from New York to Berlin in 1987, co-founded the Love Parade and fronted Space Cowboys before the two began collaborating in 2001. Married in 2006, they have recorded and toured together as hackedepicciotto since 2018, releasing albums tied to specific places and phases: a medieval church in Krems, the coast of Blackpool, a recording studio in Naples, and the suspended temporality of the pandemic.

In 2010, they gave up their Berlin home and spent 14 years moving. LICHTUNG, their tenth album, out July 10 on Mute Records, marks the end of that nomadic period. They settled in Lichtenrade, in German ‘clearing’.

Related article: Interview with Alexander Hacke and Danielle Depicciotto
about Two Decades of Music and New Live Album
Featured image: © Mara von Kummer

LICHTUNG marks the end of 14 years of nomadic life. Was there a single moment when you both knew the journey was over, or was it a gradual realisation?

Danielle de Picciotto: We don’t know if the journey is over, but at the moment, this place is so good that we’re making a stop here. It’s definitely the end of our nomadic life as it was before. When we found this place, we knew that we would be able to settle down here.

How has your working dynamic shifted since you stopped moving?

Alexander Hacke: I don’t think it has. We still work without a traditional studio setup. We still work on our compositions, we work with conceptual ideas and imagery, which then develops into pieces of music that may have not a lot to do with what we originally intended to do in the first place. At one point, the pieces of music become entities of their own, and they have their own demands, and they ask us what to do, whatever our original intentions or ambitions may have been. Our working process has remained pretty much the same since we started working together.

How did the concept of Lichtung, a clearing where light breaks through, shape the music itself, not just the title?

Danielle: It basically influenced the music too, because we tried to show light within the dark as we see a Lichtung, because a Lichtung is a place where you can see the sun. We tried to put that in the music so that we have a sound within noise very often. That’s basically what a Lichtung is for us, sonically.

Did you conceive the album as a suite from the beginning, or did that interconnected structure emerge during recording?

Alexander: Every album that we do is very much influenced by our current life situation and also the localities, the place where we recorded. Our first album was recorded in the Mojave Desert. The next one was recorded in a medieval church in Austria.

Danielle: We always have different themes. The theme is always part of the whole story of a record.

Does LICHTUNG function as a shelter from the world’s current madness, or as a way of engaging with it?

Alexander: We do try to escape the current madness and we do try to maintain our sanity. The art that we produce is supposed to be a juxtaposition to what is going on in the world and is supposed to give people energy and inspiration in order to deal with it.

Danielle: It’s our way of dealing with the madness. That’s the song Draussen on the album, I think it’s the first song on the second side. It’s basically about that, about the outside. It’s an instrumental piece where there’s a lot of percussion and it gets wilder and wilder. It’s like the storm of everything that’s happening outside. In the first song, we sing at the very end, “the storms are wild outside, but inside we are safe and we do not have fear.” That’s not the inside of the house, but the inside of the art and inside of the music. That’s how the music helps us, and we hope it also helps others to deal with the madness outside.

How did returning to the neighbourhood where Alexander grew up affect the emotional register of the music?

Alexander: Personally, I do feel safe here. This is the area where I learned how to ride a bicycle. For me, it is not very exotic, even though it is very different from the rest of Berlin. It’s a bit of a time travel too. Here, all the developments like the fall of the wall, gentrification, tourism and hipsterism, have not really affected Lichtenrade. It’s a good place to withdraw and work creatively.

Danielle: It affected the music, especially through the lyrics, because I write the lyrics and I thought: if we’re going back to Berlin, then this time I should write in German, because I’ve been living in Germany since ’87. It was a step back to Germany and a step back to Berlin, so I would really confront the language, which was an interesting experience.

What was the hardest thing about composing lyrics in a language you don’t naturally write in?

Danielle: It doesn’t come naturally, but because of that, because you see it from a certain distance, it’s interesting, it’s more like an art object. When I write in English, it’s very easy for me. With German I really had to look at the language more. It was a more intellectual way of writing. But I really enjoyed it.

Which historical connotations of the German language felt most charged or difficult to navigate?

Danielle: In general, German words carry a lot of different political or historical meaning. You have to be really aware of what words you’re using and where they are placed, because you can use a word innocently and it means something historically completely different, that’s unlike the English language. I like poetry a lot, and because we were speaking about man and nature, I tried to use universal pictures of nature, but also symbolically meaning man. In German, writing about nature is usually placed in a certain era , Goethe, Schiller, all those poets. Automatically it gets placed in that time. But because I knew that, I tried to add contemporary words. It’s a very different way of writing than in English.

This is the first music Alexander has released since departing Einstürzende Neubauten. How much did that departure inform the emotional weight of the album?

Alexander: If Einstürzende Neubauten are the forest, then I have reached the clearing now. I feel very much liberated, and I think you can also hear that liberation within the work.

Do you think LICHTUNG would have sounded different if the lyrics had remained in English?

Alexander: Well, mostly we sing in Latin, really.

Danielle: I think it would have been very different, yes.

You described the nomadic years as governed by “the principle of liminality.” What principle governs this new settled phase?

Alexander: We concerned ourselves with the concept of liminality during the pandemic, because the pandemic was a time where an initiation into a transformative life would have been possible. As we all know, it didn’t happen, things went not only back to normal, but actually worse after the pandemic finished. For me, liminality is that interesting moment between when you are not anymore who you once were and when you are not yet who you are going to be, that one spark of time in between. As creation is not something that happened a long time ago, but something that is continuously going on, you could also argue that that moment lasts forever.

Danielle: With this album, we are one step further. We’re not in this in-between state anymore because we made a decision, and this place is the decision after being in that situation of liminality. It’s interesting to make a decision, because then you’re in a different place with completely new possibilities, or problems.

How do you approach performing these long, interconnected pieces live?

Alexander: We have already played a couple of shows with the new material, and we approach it pretty much like we always do. We carry as many instruments as possible with us on the train and we change instruments during each piece many times, and we do everything ourselves.

Danielle: We play as many instruments as possible, but we can’t play all of them, so we have backing recordings playing as well. Hopefully someday we can play with an orchestra and have all the instruments live.

Are you working on new material right now?

Alexander: We have a commission for a film score that we will start to work on shortly.

Danielle: We’re also working on theatre music at the moment. We’re performing in a French theatre piece until 2028 and touring through France, Belgium and Switzerland with this production. That’s a lot of fun.

Photos courtesy of Alexander Hacke & Danielle DePicciotto

Matteo Damiani

Matteo Damiani is an Italian photographer and author. Curator of the sites Retrofuturista.com; weirditaly.com; china-underground.com and others