From Berlin to the Burnt South

When Ingmar Koch, better known as Dr. Walker, left Berlin in 2019, it wasn’t a retreat. It was a redirection—away from the industrial temples of techno, toward the dry, wind-scorched hills of Portugal’s Alentejo. After decades inside Europe’s most disobedient electronic circuits—co-founding the Liquid Sky collective, the acid-ambient duo Air Liquide, and a dozen imprints with names like DJ.ungle Fever or XXC3—Koch unplugged from the city’s circuitry and buried himself in another kind of feedback loop: the Earth itself.

In Santana da Serra, a semi-abandoned hill village in the Baixo Alentejo, he established a new headquarters for Liquid Sky. But rather than simply recreating a studio, he began planting. What emerged wasn’t a retreat from the future, but a rewilding of it.

Techno to Terraforming: Project 27027

Liquid Sky Project 27027 is Koch’s most ambitious experiment yet. Its aim is deceptively simple: to plant and care for 27,027 native trees in a region devastated by drought, eucalyptus monocultures, and economic neglect. The project, co-led with local architect Carina Guerreiro, draws from the unique ecological makeup of the southwest Iberian peninsula—home to some of the world’s oldest cork oak forests—and sets out to reintroduce biodiversity, resilience, and shade to a territory forgotten by both industry and state.

Each tree planted is a data point in a larger matrix. It is funded through Koch’s sprawling network of micro-economies: handmade synthesizers, audio workshops, limited-edition releases, concerts, and residencies. Every VCO sold helps fund a sapling. Every modular noise box contributes to canopy cover. The project refuses to harvest the trees commercially—they are meant to grow undisturbed, an archive of resistance rooted in chlorophyll.

For a man once known for blasting acid techno through East German ruins, this turn toward patient, biological time is radical. “We’ve extracted enough,” he said recently. “Now we plant.”

Liquid Sky Lisbon: June 28

That ethos comes to Lisbon on June 28, when the Liquid Sky Artist Collective takes over Village Underground for a full day and night of performances, workshops, and ambient lounges. It’s a gathering that bridges old rave energy with something more intimate, more tactile, more post-collapse.

The event marks the long-awaited Portuguese debut of Air Liquide, the legendary duo of Koch and Cem Oral (also known as Jammin Unit), whose surrealist, trippy sound helped shape the early German acid scene. Their return to the stage is rare; their appearance in Portugal, unprecedented. It’s not a nostalgia act—it’s a reactivation.

Other performers include the British sound artist Scanner, returning to Portugal for the first time since 2019, as well as Mijk van Dijk, Toktok, Andrea Cichecki, Nerk, Gabi von Dub, Irakli, Mindfullmess, and Dr. Walker himself in hybrid format. Each artist belongs to a different limb of the continental underground, from ambient to modular mayhem, from rhythmic hypnosis to glitch textures that defy genre.

Throughout the evening, two hands-on workshops—one led by Paul Tas from Error Instruments, the other by Marc Sigury of EOWAVE—will invite participants to build their own experimental audio tools. These are not introductory classes. They are acts of collective fabrication, sonic hacking in the spirit of the original rave laboratories.

Crucially, all ticket proceeds will go directly toward the continuation of the reforestation work in Alentejo. This is not a fundraiser. It is a feedback system.

Synths for the End Times

While many producers retreat into nostalgia or polish their brand aesthetics for algorithmic visibility, Koch remains committed to friction and risk. Through Liquid Sky d-Vices, his sonic hardware division, he designs unstable, handmade instruments—devices that scream, crackle, and shatter expectations. These include the PPG W2.2x4, a Eurorack wavetable oscillator that channels the ghost of 1980s digital synths, and the V4CO, an aggressive, 8-bit dual oscillator with analog overdrive and FM distortion, often paired with the GLITHc expander to unlock accidental chaos.

They are not beautiful in the conventional sense. They are unruly, often esoteric, and proudly low-fi. To Koch, they are not boutique gear for ambient hobbyists—they are sonic machetes, built for cutting through the malaise of prepackaged culture.

Video synthesis and glitch modules are also part of the Liquid Sky arsenal. One device, the Recursion Studio, allows for CV-controlled video distortion in real time, enabling live audiovisual performances that resemble seizure-inducing rituals rather than stage shows. These tools are both artistic and philosophical, asking: What happens when you stop aiming for perfection? What if your instrument fights back?

The Anti-Berghain

While Berlin techno achieved global domination, mutating into an aesthetic of brutalist chic and industrial cool, Koch turned away. He saw in the rise of clubs like Berghain a retreat into control—ritualized, curated, monetized. In contrast, his work remained loose, glitchy, human. Where Berghain perfected techno’s cathedral, Koch preferred its swamp. His projects sprawled from Cologne basements to squatted Azorean radar stations, always refusing linearity or acclaim.

Liquid Sky was never a brand. It was a network of signals. A shifting organism. A refusal to professionalize the underground.

In that spirit, the Lisbon event is not a festival. There are no VIP zones, no sponsored cocktails, no Instagram-ready lighting rigs. What emerges instead is a temporary zone of co-presence, a system of shared frequencies, a moment where things can still go beautifully wrong.

Sound as Soil

There is something almost mythic about the idea of a man who once flooded Europe’s nightclubs with pulsating acid basslines now spending his days digging holes and planting acorns. But for Koch, this is not a contradiction. It is a continuum.

In his world, silence is not the absence of music. It is the ground from which sound emerges. A tree is not decorative—it is a delay line for time itself. The Earth, once drained, must be rewired. And the tools for that work—whether modular synths or mycorrhizal fungi—are already in our hands.

To plant a tree is to remix the future at 0.0001 BPM.

A Rave for the Roots

Liquid Sky’s presence in Lisbon is fleeting. By dawn, the cables will be coiled, the dust swept, the basslines fading. But something will remain—a tension, a shift, a trace of another frequency. Not utopia. Not escape. But the possibility of reconnection.

In a time of climate collapse, cultural gentrification, and algorithmic erasure, Koch’s work offers a counter-rhythm. Not a solution. A direction.

From signal to soil, from rave to root.

Not a party.
A ritual of return.

June 28, 2025, Village Underground Lisboa
~20€, benefits reforestation in Alentejo
Featuring: Air Liquide, Scanner, Mijk van Dijk, Andrea Cichecki, Irakli, Nerk, Toktok, Dr. Walker & more
Workshops: Paul Tas (Error Instruments), Marc Sigury (EOWAVE France)