Björn Mahendra Tillmann is a music producer, sound designer, and university lecturer based in Berlin. He teaches at HS Osnabrück and HS Macromedia Berlin and has previously been a guest lecturer at Popakademie BW and BIMM Berlin.
In 2024, his paper on AI in songwriting and composition was published by transcript Verlag, which he presented at TU Braunschweig, NØK in Mannheim, and AEC in Ghent, among others.
Artificial Intelligence in Songwriting and Composing - Perspectives and Challenges in Creative Practices
He is founder of the music label collective RAUFASER Musikgruppe and its sublabel apnoe. He also shapes the musical development of Sophia the Robot as part of the Music Department at Hanson Robotics.
BAERK.
contact@apnoeonline.com
BAERK. is a chindo-german producer-artist and sound designer based in Berlin. His music moves at the intersection of club electronics, experimental synthesis and Indonesian musical heritage, re-translating Gamelan textures and Pelog tunings into contemporary dancefloor rituals. Rooted in the inner tensions of bi-culturalism and in a deep curiosity about neural synthesis and self-trained AI models, BAERK. treats the studio as a site of ongoing mutation.
His debut GADOGADO (Mixtape) (apnoe / RAUFASER TONTRAEGER, March 2026) is a document of six years in motion, a border-crossing collection of productions that maps the journey so far. New material is in progress: trance-inducing, polyrhythmic and informed by raw field recordings, among them Gamelan cassette tapes from his mother's collection, an archive of inherited sound re-translated into hybridised, high-intensity club music.
As BAERK., he has performed across Europe and Southeast Asia, from sweaty underground clubs to a set on Mount Batur, one of Bali's active volcanoes.
Armed with a Eurorack modular and a deconstructed MPC approach rooted in 2010s controllerism and live dub mixing techniques, BAERK. plays live with the full weight of his productions and then dismantles them in real time. Snatched vocals from adverts, pop songs and internet detritus resurface inside the experimental beats, stripped of context and pushed somewhere else entirely. The set moves between high-intensity club energy and introspective, dystopian atmospheres, balancing artificial sound design with emotional depth. Cryptic, polyrhythmic beats open into ambient plateaus and dissolve in walls of noise, a tension between organic presence and synthetic distortion that evolves from show to show.
LISTEN
WATCH
ext. PRODUCTIONS
PLAYLIST
nour - GARALI EH (EGY)
SARILOU - Miroirs (FRA)
JEWLS - Serpentine Lovers (GER)
PØLAR - PØLAR Album (GER)
PLAYLIST
nour - GARALI EH (EGY)
SARILOU - Miroirs (FRA)
JEWLS - Serpentine Lovers (GER)
PØLAR - PØLAR Album (GER)
SCORING
The Visible Child
Starring Isaac Silva Looker
Writer, Director, Editor Andjani Autumn
DOP, Production Design, VFX: Ivarr Jacobsen
Character Design: Dilara Özkan
Original Score: by me
Narrator: MusicTJ
Sound Design: Jan Heymel
Colorist: Spyridon Chrysomallidis
Production Assistants: Lea Chamier, Gizem Özkan
081125
050625
UNCIVILISATION
COLOGNE
010625
/w TAROUG
MÜNSTER - LUFT & LAUNE
100525
/w KIND OF DUSK
BERLIN
100524
LOOPHOLE
/w PHILO
/w EXP.ECON
HEIDELBERG
230324
ZWINGER X
HAMBURG
220324
SLOT
NORMAL`NO - MANNHEIM (GER)
NORMAL`NO - STOCKHOLM (SWE)
THEATRE
KLIMATRILOGIE - SCHAUSPIEL HANOVER (GER)