We’ve known Formen for some time now and have always appreciated his eccentric, detail-oriented, yet warm personality. However, he has a habit of holding on to completed releases indefinitely, as they never quite “meet his expectations”. More than once, this tendency has forced us at Empty Space to gently nudge him toward finally sharing his work.

This was also the case with Simulacrum. The EP features four experimental, minimalistic dub techno tracks with delicate clicks intricately woven throughout. Completed in December 2022, the EP has since lived quietly in Formen’s archive of unreleased material. By the end of 2024, he was deeply immersed in new projects: composing the soundtrack for Meat Market 2.0, developing his experimental lathe-cut series Formenlehre, and generally staying busy cutting vinyl. It took significant persuasion to convince him to let this particular chapter of his creative journey see the light of day.

We consider ourselves fortunate that he was eventually swayed. Still, he agreed to release Simulacrum only under one condition: it would exist solely as a limited, vinyl-only edition—17 dubplates, each hand-cut by Formen in his own studio. A deal we were happy to accept. In the end, we can only wonder how many more hidden works lie buried in the depths of his archive.

For the artwork, we collaborated with Blenda Blitz—a young Polaroid photographer from Lausanne. Fascinated by the imperfection, immediacy, and singularity of the medium, she has been curating a portfolio of minimalist, saturated, and experimental images for some time now. For Simulacrum, she created a mise en abyme composed of Polaroids of the release itself—each EP becoming a further step into the simulation of an image of a simulation of an image of a simulation...