The Black Warhols: "I Don’t Have to Compromise"

THE BLACK WARHOLS does not emerge as a nostalgic detour from techno, but as a fracture inside identity itself.

Beneath the silver wig, the leather jacket and the constructed persona, Alan Oldham seems less interested in reinvention than in exposing the instability of the modern self: a figure suspended between performance, memory and projection.

What unfolds throughout this conversation is not simply a reflection on music, but on the gradual transformation of culture into surface, rebellion into aesthetic, participation into spectatorship. Berlin, once imagined as a sanctuary for outsiders and artistic freedom, appears here both alive and slowly consumed by the same forces it once resisted. Club culture, too, becomes a mirror of a wider condition: a generation increasingly connected through screens, yet increasingly distant from physical presence and collective experience.

And yet, beneath the disillusionment, there remains a tension toward something human. A desire for texture, artifacts, stories, physicality, for forms of connection that cannot be fully virtualized. THE BLACK WARHOLS inhabits precisely that unstable territory: between irony and sincerity, surface and meaning, dystopia and longing.

Not an escape from reality, but a distorted reflection of what reality is becoming.

Welcome. THE BLACK WARHOLS introduces a strong visual and performative dimension -  the wig, the jacket, the constructed persona. Do you see this alter ego as a mask, a form of protection, or as a way to reveal something that your previous identity could not contain?

The latter. I consider the BLACK WARHOLS project a form of performance art. A visual cue to get across the idea that something new is here to challenge your previous perceptions of Alan Oldham, the Detroit Techno artist who usually makes and plays 4/4 dance music.

Your sound draws from genres historically rooted in alienation and counterculture. Do you feel music today still carries that oppositional force, or has it been absorbed into a more aesthetic, less disruptive language?

Once again, the latter. I began to see the shift when getting signed by a major label and hoping for a sync deal for your music (adverts, TV shows, movies) became normalized and not considered “selling out” at all. For that to happen, that music has to be aesthetically pleasing on some level, not “oppositional” at all. Unless it’s controlled opposition, which we now know a band like Rage Against the Machine was, for example.

When everything becomes content, even rebellion risks turning into style. How do you protect meaning from being reduced to surface?

Being an often-overlooked underground or outsider artist, it’s easy, nobody’s looking for me. Nobody wants to impose changes on my art. That’s not something I have to navigate. I don’t have to compromise. Ironically, though, surface, artifice and superficiality are core Andy Warhol concepts.

Tracks like “We Are Dead Stars” and “Screengazer” suggest a distance between presence and perception. Do you feel digital culture is reshaping our experience of reality, turning us more into observers than participants?

Absolutely. It’s really becoming apparent in real life. Everything social is slowly dying because of it, including club culture. This is a fundamental shift amongst the younger generations. I don’t know if it can ever be reversed. Hence the term “screengazer,” watching a mediated image as opposed to being a real participant in social events.

Berlin has long been mythologised as a space of freedom and reinvention. From your perspective today, is it still a place where identities are transformed, or has it become a stage where they are performed?

Why not both, haha. Although the “poor but sexy” Berlin of the early 2000s has been gone for over 20 years now, with an aggressive push to gentrify and corporatize the city, it’s still a place of artistic and sexual freedom and discovery for many. People still flock here from all over the world for the chance to actually live as artists and creatives. Some will make it, many don’t. But the dream remains. I still would not leave Berlin, if it was my choice.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TUZbbCK_VuY

As artificial identities and digital personas become more common, do you think projects like THE BLACK WARHOLS anticipate a future where the self is no longer fixed, but constantly shifting?

Honestly, I never thought that deeply about it. But maybe I stumbled onto something in my quest to do something new and different. An unintended by-product.

Looking toward the future, do you imagine music evolving into hybrid, interdisciplinary forms - where sound, image and identity merge - or do you see a return to something more raw and human?

Again, both. They’re happening already. A return to history, form, texture and substance especially. The youth are craving physicality again over virtuality. I hear it when I talk to them. I thought I’d be pushed aside as an older artist, but I’m embraced. They’re dying to hear the lore. They want the artifacts. What form will this take in the future? No way to tell.