“Cause the players gonna play, play, play, play. And the haters gonna hate, hate, hate, hate.”

Taylor Swift’s “Shake it Off” plays over the office speakers for the third time. We have the top 40 Pandora station going and underneath the cyclical chorus you can hear bursts of typing on bouncy keyboards and the click, click, click of tabs being closed, emails opened.

Boredom can be lethal. It sinks into your bones and makes you soft with complacency.

But fuck, there are anecdotes for this madness! For me, it’s music and writing. A thought provoking paragraph or an unexpected house beat lets creativity seep back into my brain and cools off my head.

And one sound that I can always count on for revival is Berlin-based, Moderat.

Back in February 2015 WalterCronkTight broke down Moderat’s sound, attributing it to their Berlin roots – a lingering culture desire to perfect the synthesizer, fine tune the reverberations of a speaker, and push sound beyond its auditory boundaries.

In March Moderat released their third album, III and I approached it with caution. I didn’t want any preconceived notions to color my experience. Was Moderat really that good?

Yes.

Once again they defy conventional sound. It’s house-y, trance-y, a tribute to the purest form of German techno. But it’s also fucking catchy, and I find myself singing along in a Taylor Swift-like falsetto.

Check out the music video for Moderat’s single, Running, and let it push you to the creative brink…

———-