The first time Richie Culver played Berghain, it was a Sunday afternoon at 1pm, and the venue was packed. He describes that moment as the closest he's come to what he truly wanted as a kid — to be a professional footballer, playing in front of a full stadium. That dream never came true: he had a stint at Hull City, later a brief spell at Doncaster Rovers, but ultimately couldn't make it work. What he got instead was a pair of turntables for Christmas at twelve or thirteen, and later, the path into techno he'd walk under the name Quiet Husband.
For this new FADER Mix, Quiet Husband describes the project as "a tribute to techno, and also an investigation." Drawing on producers like Floid and Spekki Webu who keep pushing the genre's vocabulary forward, Culver describes the overall feel as "swamp-like: murky, organic, constantly shifting." The tracklist includes his own track "Dull," alongside Archypness's "Mahagon," "Drakhön," and "Duh," Floid's "Zoona," Wild Moss's "Abo Abo," Feral and Spekki Webu's collaborative "Exitude (Floating Version)," Gui & Adhi's "Desiran," Raär's "Edge Trigger," and Spekki Webu's "ceism.iii." He told FADER he wanted to try faster tempos this time, occasionally stepping outside pure dancefloor functionality into something more disorienting, even hard to put into words — "a sense of forward motion and dream-logic at once, something close to sleep paralysis."
Culver's work has always moved between underground and mainstream. His visual art, often marked by scrawled text pieces, once caught Drake's eye: the Canadian rapper used one of Culver's 2021 paintings reading "huge fan of your old stuff" in 2022 merch. He's also scored a runway show for LOEWE, and brought his dark, dense techno into venues and spaces like Berghain, Atonal, Tresor, The White Hotel, Carlos/Ishikawa, and Camden Arts Centre. Beyond his latest solo album, "The Architecture Of Perception," his newest painting exhibition, "The Builder's Daughter," curated by PASSAGE, is on view in Sofia, Bulgaria — collage and abstraction making the works look like they were dug out of rubble.
