*37 copies limited edition* Formen's second album, "Dialektik," approaches the ambivalence of our contemporary society through the possibilities of sound design. The individual tracks, as well as the album as a whole, are filled with emotional contrasts, conflicting timbres, and inherent ambiguity. By bringing together opposing ideas, the album attempts to develop its own aesthetics, combining seemingly contradictory concepts such as noise/harmony, dysfunction/function, analog/digital, nature/technology, rationality/ecstasy, sentimentality/objectivity, intuition/planning and randomness/composition. In this context, "Dialektik" can be understood as a musical essay in which sound design, composition, and the functionality of analog electronic music are explored from a juxtaposing perspective - very much in the sense of thesis-antithesis-synthesis.

This dialectic is also expressed on the meta-level of the album: Based on McLuhan's thesis that "the medium is the message," Formen's "Dialektik" will not only be released digitally but also as a strictly limited lathe cut series. Formen wants to highlight the fact that physical media can no longer be understood as a mass medium, which opens up new possibilities for artistic expression: Vinyl, for instance, can not 'only' be understood as a medium that carries music, but as an independent work of art in its own right, subject to its own artistic, technical, and artisanal aesthetics.

With this in mind, the 37 lathe cuts, all of which Formen manufactured in his studio, are accompanied by individually crafted artwork: Formen prepared high-quality, heavy Fedrigoni paper and then collaged it with technical drawings. The collages are hand-picked cut-outs from vintage mechanical engineering drawings, dated between 1916 and 1948, which Formen found in the archives of the technical universities of Neuchâtel and La Chaux-de-Fonds. As each of these technical drawings is unique, the resulting covers are also to be understood as 37 original pieces. Every single lathe cut, as well as every single cover, was manufactured by Formen and can be understood as an original in a series of 37. Each lathe cut, therefore, features a small signature from Formen and its own serial number in the run-out groove.

Stephan Mathieu from Schwebung Mastering was responsible for mastering the album. We would like to thank him for his valuable help and work. For the lathe cuts, the individual masters had to be adapted to the physical properties of the medium, which is why the frequency spectrum and dynamic range of the analog and digital tracks differ slightly from one another.