Unprocessed

About Unprocessed

Unprocessed started as a bedroom project in Berlin around 2014, back when Manuel Gartner was supposed to be finishing a degree in sound design but kept getting sidetracked by broken field recordings and malfunctioning samplers. The name came from his philosophy of leaving mistakes in—clicks, distortion, the hum of cheap equipment. Everything that normal producers spent hours removing became his signature.

The early stuff was pretty bare. Just textures, really. Untitled Process dropped in 2016 on a small netlabel most people have never heard of, and it got passed around certain corners of the internet where people argue about whether silence counts as music. The opening track, "Recursive," was literally just the sound of a failing hard drive processed through granular synthesis. It shouldn't have worked, but it did.

Static Motion in 2018 was the one that broke through, though "broke through" is relative when you're making ambient electronic music. It hit some algorithmic playlists and suddenly Gartner had an actual audience. The title track became his most-played song, this slowly evolving piece built from detuned piano samples and what he claimed was the sound of Berlin's S-Bahn system recorded at 4am. "Held Frequencies" was the other standout—nine minutes of gradually shifting tones that somehow felt urgent despite barely changing.

He relocated to Reykjavik in 2019, which you can absolutely hear on Digital Decay. Everything got colder, more spacious. Less urban grit, more glacial drift. "Pattern Recognition" and "Memory Leak" both leaned into longer forms, 15-plus minutes of patient sound design that rewarded headphone listening. Some fans thought he'd gone too minimal. Others thought he'd finally figured out what he was trying to say all along.

Silence Between came out last year and split his audience pretty cleanly down the middle. It was his most collaborative work, featuring vocalists and actual melodies, which felt like a betrayal to the people who'd been there since Untitled Process. But tracks like "Signal Loss" and "Between States" showed he could work with traditional elements without losing the aesthetic. The closing piece, "Unrendered," stripped everything back to just field recordings and the occasional synth pad—a reminder that he hadn't completely abandoned the approach that started everything.

These days Gartner splits time between Reykjavik and Berlin, puts out music irregularly, and seems fine with his niche. He scores the occasional art installation or experimental film. The live shows are rare and usually in galleries rather than venues. No social media presence to speak of. Just someone still interested in the sounds between sounds, the textures most people process out. Still unprocessed.

Unprocessed shows are deliberately uncomfortable. Minimal visual production, long stretches of silence punctuating dense noise. Crowds tend toward the attentive rather than celebratory. Not the kind of set where you check your phone.

Known for Untitled Process, Static Motion, Digital Decay, Silence Between

See Unprocessed Live