Tim Ra · Jens Strüver: Kosmische Kuriere
Release & Vernissage on April 25th, 2026 · 19-22h
@ Lovelab Dreamspace · Pappelallee 25 · 10437 Berlin
/w DJ Jens Strüver & Tim Ra live
A crisis of humanity threatens to destroy the very foundations of life on Earth. Tim Ra and Jens Strüver answer with a radically human vision: a cosmic humanity that transcends its limitations through empathy and love. In the city of the Wall and the Love Parade, they have created music for a world without borders—music that expands the human into the cosmic, and in the cosmic rediscovers its own humanity.
Drawing deeply from the musical legacy of the twentieth century, Ra & Strüver fuse jazz, classical, exotica, and cinematic avant-garde into soundworlds that feel both grounded and transcendent — familiar, yet strangely displaced. Airy and transparent in its instrumentation, carried by relaxed grooves that often leave the drums behind entirely, the album opens a view into the cosmos — not as escape, but as an invitation to understand the collapse of our old systems as a necessary new beginning.
Here, Strüver’s encyclopedic musical knowledge and vast archive meet Ra’s finesse with sequencers, hardware, and artificial intelligence. Over months of sessions—using meticulously designed text prompts, analog outboard gear, and painstaking sound design on the computer—the two artists shaped ethereal acoustic visions for a world that overcomes division and celebrates plurality.
Side A moves lightly and dance-like through the universe: from the shimmering dawn of »Vénus Matinée« with its Mancini echoes, to the hypnotic pulse of »Pulsar« – an interstellar bolero that unfurls with temperament and culminates in galactic ecstasy via mariachi trumpets — into the dizzying »Labyrinth der Sterne« (labyrinth of stars), before »Planet Außer Kurs« (Planet Off Course) tips the journey into playful unpredictability. Then the elegant »Saturn Soirée« invites you to cruise between the rings of the gas giant.
Side B turns deeper and darker. »Darkstar« and »Nebula« breathe—with choral voices—the misty nostalgia of grand orchestral sci-fi soundtracks, tracing a line from Gustav Holst through Bernard Herrmann into the present, before »Wasser des Lebens« (Water of Life) gathers everything into a weightless sweetness. It is here that Ra and Strüver’s human vision condenses: even in darkness, it is the sound of family that speaks of a shared future.
Tim Ra & Jens Strüver—the Cosmic Couriers—pour the sweet nectar of an unfamiliar universe that has, in truth, always been our home. This music offers a counter-vision to hatred, division, and destruction: elegant, hypnotic, timeless—and a promise that a world without walls is not only imaginable, but within reach.
Short Biographies
Jens Strüver
Jens Strüver is a Berlin-based DJ and producer, founder of the label m=minimal, and an archivist of experimental musical traditions. Through projects such as Borngräber & Strüver and J.R. Plankton, he weaves Krautrock heritage, minimal techno, and cinematic sound research—and has helped bring long-out-of-print recordings by Conrad Schnitzler back into circulation. Current work includes a new album with Stephan Mensger, as well as Prismatic, created with Marco Baldini and Werner Dafeldecker for the acclaimed label Room40. Strüver is also working on music by Conrad Schnitzler and Ernstalbrecht Stiebler. With detail-obsessed DJ sets and unexpected collaborations, he embodies a curator’s role—melding sound archaeology and avant-garde into a radically human musical practice.
Tim Ra
Tim Ra is a German-American producer, rapper, and multimedia artist. In his Berlin gallery Lovelab Dreamspace, he merges synths, sequencers, and artificial intelligence into futuristic, psychedelic space visions, while exhibiting major contemporary artists—among them Ulli Lust. As co-founder of the electro-hip-hop formations Splatterdandy and A.M.T., and author of several oral-history books on subversive music cultures with Max Dax, he has long intertwined politics, science fiction, and community activism—often under his alias Robert Defcon—into a multifaceted practice. From psychedelic live shows to AI-generated image and film worlds, Tim Ra develops transmedia visions of a borderless, empathic humanity—visions that tear down the walls in our heads.