AU is two artist/musicians from The Hague, The Netherlands, Jan Borchers and Paul Klaui. They play improvised electro-music. AU's style is original and innovative. Their music is interesting and unobtrusive at the same time. They explore electronic and electro-acoustic sounds in a very relaxed and sensitive manner. There are also some vocal parts. non-existing input has 13 tracks. Each is uniuqe but there is a definite continuity throughout. At times the music is hypnotic and meditative, and at other times it's active and expressive - but never harsh or aggressive.

mp3 examples:

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We highly recommend non-existing input, but in this we are not unique. Here are some exerpts from some reviews:

Kinda Music 2002
AU's Non-Existing Input is a refreshing album. Read on if you want to know why.
AU is a two-headed band from the Netherlands, and make a very original kind of modern experimental electronica. The kind that scares you, but, because you wholeheartedly want to know how it ends, you never cover you eyes. The kind that, for once, doesn't resemble the blueprints that all the Aphex Twins and Autechres of this world have designed. The kind that chooses its own way, all the time. The kind that is completely improvised and recorded in the band members' own living rooms, on obscure equipment. The kind that leaves the obligatory laptops and glitches behind in favor of orginal craftmanship. Because the music is highly original, it's difficult to give some references. Some passages sound like a louder and noisier Biosphere. COIL surely is some kind of influence, but it never gets too obvious. It can't be called dark ambient, can't be called soundscapes, can't be called IDM, and can't be called free improvisation. Therefore, this electronica album is very refreshing, in today's world of copycats who even sample each other's intended glitches. Non-Existing Input is exciting, new, frightening, and above all, very very good. Tremendous album.

The Wire August 2002 The untitled tracks on this cd by the duo of artist/musician Jan Borchers and Paul Klaui were recorded in various living rooms (presumably in The Hague, where AU are based) over the last year and a half. They're all live improvisations, which might explain the documentary feel permeating the album, and there's a textural depth of field to the sounds and drones that AU favour throughout.

Rather than focus on conventional melodies as such, the structures here concentrate on sculpting dense, emotive, shifting clouds of ambience and sustained analogue notes, around which heavily reverbed events circle and disperse. Snatched moments of overheard conversations whispering to themselves, soft electronic flutters, and drifting piano chords create a ghostly, grainy, sombre mood, alternately soothing and unnerving.

Essence magazine August 2002.

AU offers the listener a hallucinating world of sound. Mesmerizing soundscapes constructed with the aid of electronic and sampled sources. A hypnotizing and psychedelic experience.

Smilin Ears magazine September 2002

Flashes of seventies Krautrock, analogue electronics and samples, AU provide the perfect soundtrack for an imaginary fieldtrip into unknown territory. An album of endless discoveries that you can play forever....

Richard di Santo, www.incursion.org, April 2003

With the second instalment in the Location Sound series on Locust Music comes a new release from AU, the duo of Jan Borchers and Paul Klaui...AU have chosen The Hague as their subject, the city where they live, spend their days and nights, and, more importantly, the city in which they often find themselves riding their bicycles. Their field recording (aptly titled "cycling") is a journey through the city, recorded while on their bikes, and takes you through quiet streets, and later into noisy ones, with a brass band and the murmur of crowds, and ends as the two dismount and take a seat in what is likely their favourite pub. The recording is nicely done, with some effective stereo shifting giving the full effect of travelling microphones, all the while accompanied by the gentle whirr of the wheels and gears under their feet, and the sweaking of their seats. The second piece (even more aptly titled "recycling") is an ambient retelling of their journey, in which the field recording is played again, it seems, from start to finish, but this time with numerous effects and the addition of guitar (quiet, resting softly on the surface) and synths, the sounds echoing gently, in a deep, calming wash of sound.