Franco-German media artist Enkidu rankX [ınˈkiːdu ræŋk eks] was born 1972 in Saarbrücken / Germany. After his studies in Belgium he settled down in Berlin in 1996 where he is working and living up to this day. His work is comprised of video-art, glitch-art, installations and interaction with dance and theatre. “My art deals with issues such as relational miscommunication, the effect of technology on the human condition and the loss of identity that comes with the advent of virtualization an simulation.”
Ur.X — follow/up · record release · KUKUMU, 24.09.2026
Well my friends, propaganda works best when it is served with cake and cheap furniture.
follow/up is the new ur.x record / gets its official release party on 24.09.2026, 20 Uhr at KUKUMU, Lübecker Str. 43, Berlin Moabit. Record release party, as the poster says. I will be there pressing keys and questioning my life choices, as usual.
and this time it comes with the full treatment: live video projections alongside the music. the record will not just be played; it will be seen. you know i do not do things halfway, the visuals are part of the deal.
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come by, have a drink, listen to the thing actually being played out loud in a room instead of through your phone speaker. that still matters, more than ever.
OK, so Uri and I have been quietly at it again. New Ur.X episode: follow/up — the trailer is up on the channel, the thing itself will follow. Or follow up. Hence the title. Nobody said we were subtle.
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As always, Ur.X is me and Uri Killisch — electronics, real instruments, and the occasional argument about reverb. The last full-length, no w here, is still out there (Spotify, urx-sound.com) if you want to catch up first. No obligation. It won’t improve your life expectancy, but it fills the silence nicely.
More on the release soon. Until then, embrace the propaganda:
Save the date, or better: save the evening. 29. April 2026, Staatstheater Cottbus (Großes Haus): REDOX — Bild · Text · Klang. Kunst hinterm Eisernen, in cooperation with the Brandenburgisches Landesmuseum für moderne Kunst (BLMK).
REDOX, as the chemists among you will know, is a reaction of giving and taking — loss and gain, transformation. That is the concept: works by Sabine Herrmann and Klaus Killisch from the late GDR and the years after are not presented as sealed historical material, but as active reaction partners — pushed through image, text and sound in live collaboration, and recharged in dialogue with the present.
On stage: Sabine Herrmann & Klaus Killisch (idea, image, video, selection), Ur.X (Enkidu rankX, Uri Killisch) — electronics, sampling, video — and actors of the Staatstheater Cottbus: Ariadne Pabst, Nathalie Schörken, Torben Appel. The electronic layer does not illustrate; it argues on equal terms with image rhythms, cuts and pauses. What that looks like in practice: see above, everything in black and white until the wires say otherwise.
Cottbus again, then — and again a house of industry turned culture. The Dieselkraftwerk chapter is here: toshh2c at Dieselkraftwerk, 2022. The powers that be keep handing us their former machinery, and we keep supplying the noise.
Ur.X packed the rigs and went to Superbooth 2025 — Europe’s biggest gathering for synths, modular madness and music technology, at FEZ-Berlin (20.–22. Mai 2025). Enkidu rankX & Uri Killisch, live, electronic, and sufficiently unstable.
A synth fair is an honest place: everyone there believes a machine can feel something. We did our part to confirm the suspicion — electronics, sampling and video, wired the usual Ur.X way. New material from „no w here“ included; the signal, as always, decodes better in person.
The photo above documents the official Ur.X diplomatic technique for crowded fairgrounds: advanced glitch, both subjects either moving or transcending.
Ur.X live at Onkan-音間, Bushwick, New York — Foto (c) Sulamith Sallmann (sulamith-sallmann.de)
Ur.X went transatlantic. Sunday, April 20 2025, 7pm — Onkan-音間 at Synesthesia, Bushwick, New York. Onkan, if you will, is the ethereal space between notes — an appropriate slot for a band whose website currently decodes corrupted transmissions between Berlin and nowhere.
The evening opened with the piano-electric performance of Richard Sylvarnes, longtime co-conspirator. Then Ur.X — rankX & Uri Killisch wove their electronic beats into the atmosphere, while Ayumi Ishito (saxophone) and Daniel Carter (horns) engaged in a spontaneous improvisational dialogue. The occasion: the celebration of new album releases — ours among them, „no w here“.
Ur.X — Enkidu rankX & Uri Killisch, April 2025 — Foto (c) Sulamith Sallmann (sulamith-sallmann.de)
New York heard it first. The signal, naturally, kept travelling: urx-sound.com · Spotify.
Silence dances with melody, they promised. We brought the melody. The silence can complain.
Second night across the pond: Sunview Luncheonette, Brooklyn
Ur.X live @ Sunview Luncheonette, Brooklyn — As part of the „Vampÿrates & Others“ bill, we brought Ur.X across the pond to 221 Nassau St, Brooklyn in April 2025. It is always a great pleasure to share space and bandwidth with people like Richard Sylvarnes, Bradley Eros, and Keiko Uenishi. Direct, low-latency electronic transmission in high physical proximity. Listen to what happened and get an idea of what interesting sounds there are around once you leave the realm of mind-numbing mainstream musac.
Photos on this page: (c) Sulamith Sallmann (sulamith-sallmann.de) unless noted.
Signal detected, decoded, released. Ur.X — the Berlin-based unit of Enkidu rankX and Uri Killisch — has a new album out: „no w here“. Isolation, Trieb, Druck, Sehnsucht — the tracklist reads like a transmission log from a self that refuses to stay assembled. Because that is roughly what it is. The cover, in case you wonder, is exactly as alive as it looks.
The album lives where all good fragments live: on Spotify and wherever else streaming carries a signal.
And because an album these days needs a haunting ground of its own: urx-sound.com. Not a website — a decoder. Signal strength fluctuating, fragments embedded, coordinates pointing somewhere between Berlin and nowhere. You will figure it out; the site certainly will not make it easy. That is not a bug.
Listen in order, or in disorder. The corruption level is at 37% and rising.
background radiation bei Radio Industry, Woltersdorf — Foto (c) Sulamith Sallmann (sulamith-sallmann.de)
Radiation travels well by radio — fitting, then, that we took background radiation, our book and multimedia project about nuclear obsession, to Radio Industry, the Woltersdorfer Festival für Kunst + Gegenwart (28.8.–10.9.2023).
Frank Diersch had the kindness (or the courage) to invite Sulamith Sallmann and me to present the project on his station — recorded on site in Woltersdorf bei Berlin, September 2023. We talked radiation, history, and why you cannot un-hear a Geiger counter once you have heard one. The book behind it all: Hintergrundstrahlung / Background Radiation — das Künstlerbuch.
The festival itself was a fine beast: interdisciplinary, radio-centric, and hosted in a village that once powered Berlin from the water — the old Woltersdorf power station theme runs deep this year, much like our gig in another power plant, the Dieselkraftwerk in Cottbus. Industry, converted into culture. A pattern, one might say.
Full visual documentation by Sulamith Sallmann, as usual: Festival für Kunst + Gegenwart 2023. Go and listen, if you have the stomach for it.
Cover: Hintergrundstrahlung / Background Radiation — Künstlerbuch, Eine Art Fabrik, 2023
Out now, as of March 2023: „Hintergrundstrahlung / Background Radiation“, the artist book by photographer Sulamith Sallmann and media artist Enkidu rankX (that would be me), published by Eine Art Fabrik.
The backstory is less cozy than the paper: I grew up in the late 70s and early 80s in a French bay wedged between a nuclear power plant and a fuel reprocessing facility. Sulamith grew up at the same time on the other side of the Iron Curtain. Between Chernobyl 1986 and the Cold War, nuclear catastrophe was not an abstraction — it was the neighbour. Then 1989 came and everyone agreed the danger had been dealt with. Handy consensus. We all know how that opinion aged by 2022.
In March 2015, when Vladimir Putin vanished from public view for ten days, I recorded radio transmissions from around the world — private, commercial, military, some encrypted, some just noise. Against the backdrop of Ukraine 2014, something big was audibly about to happen. Out of that material came the sound collage „Hintergrundstrahlung / Background Radiation“, and eventually this book: Sulamith’s photographs, my text.
Auftritt von toshh2c im Dieselkraftwerk, Cottbus — Foto (c) Sulamith Sallmann (sulamith-sallmann.de)
Well, some gigs you remember for the room. This one had a room with history: the Dieselkraftwerk in Cottbus — a former power plant, since 2008 home to the Brandenburgisches Landesmuseum für moderne Kunst. Playing electroacoustic music where the turbines used to hum has a certain irony to it. We provided the noise, the building provided the reverb.
toshh2c live at Dieselkraftwerk / Brandenburgisches Landesmuseum für moderne Kunst, Cottbus — 3. Dezember 2022. Uri Killisch & Enkidu rankX.
All photos by Sulamith Sallmann, who stood closer to the action than anyone reasonably should. The full set lives on her page: Auftritt von toshh2c im Dieselkraftwerk.
Go and have a look. You might find something that pleases or disturbs your eyes — same deal as with the ears.
Oath of Stone Oak — a live sound performance by Enkidu rankX and Klaus Killisch in collaboration with poet Robert Fitterman, recorded at the exhibition space of Broken Dimanche, Berlin, 2018, released September 2022. One track, one oath, sworn somewhere between poetry and electricity.
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