Early on Saturday, September 15, Chicago experimental musician Brett Naucke got home from the High Zero Festival to find he’d been robbed. The items stolen included an iMac and two hard drives that held an album he’d finished just days before. The product of nine months’ work, it was slated for release on the label run by synth manufacturer Make Noise—which will now put out a different and still forthcoming Naucke album, for obvious reasons. “Because I’ve been playing one of the songs live, one of the tracks was completely salvageable,” Naucke says. “It’s actually on my laptop, which is not stolen.” Unfortunately there’s no practical way to re-create the rest of the record. Naucke’s girlfriend Natasha Ryan launched a GoFundMe last week to pay for replacement equipment, and it passed its $1,600 goal in a few hours. He aims to complete a new album this year—the robbery, he says, “put me in supercharged mode.”
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