Düsseldorf-based musician Stefan Schwander, aka Harmonious Thelonious, Returns with New Album Grumpy Pieces

New album draws on influences from Pan-African and Middle Eastern rhythmic concepts, repetitive minimal structures, stripped-down electronics and noise used as a structural force.

February 25, 2026

Hamburg, Germany, February 25, 2026 —Bureau B announces Grumpy Pieces, the latest album from Düsseldorf-based musician Stefan Schwander, aka Harmonious Thelonious, available on CD/LP/ Digital. Grumpy Pieces gathers many of the elements that have defined the music of Harmonious Thelonious over the years – while simultaneously pushing them apart.

The album seems to tighten many of Harmonious Thelonious' earlier ideas such as interlocking melodies, hypnotic patterns, a sustained focus on rhythm and texture, paired with a sound that is rougher, drier and more immediate than before.

Musically, Grumpy Pieces draws from familiar territory within the Harmonious Thelonious universe: Pan-African and Middle Eastern rhythmic concepts, repetitive minimal structures, stripped-down electronics and noise used as a structural force. Yet everything feels less fixed, more unstable, at times close to falling apart. Melodies grind against rugged bass foundations; dry snare hits cut sharply through the mix. The groove remains central, but now carries a nervous, fractured quality – noticeably more restless than one might expect from a project active for nearly eighteen years.

The title Grumpy Pieces is more than a wry aside. The album reflects a present shaped by political and social tension. Anger, uncertainty and a muted sense of despair run through the tracks, without the music ever becoming literal or lapsing into overt commentary. Instead, it operates through friction: between dancefloor momentum and disruption, immediacy and resistance.

While the A-side opens in a comparatively direct and driving manner with "And You May Find Yourself", the B-side increasingly embraces disintegration as a guiding principle, culminating in the aptly titled closing track "Dissolving". The album was once again produced in Schwander’s home base of Düsseldorf, using a working method rooted firmly in the moment. Each of the tracks were not arranged on a screen, but developed intuitively, recorded, abandoned and reshaped. This approach also connects directly to the live practice of Harmonious Thelonious: music understood as a repetitive state, a trance-like space that insists rather than narrates.

Limitation, intuition and spontaneity are not stylistic gestures here, but essential conditions of the music itself. Influences from everyday listening – from Brazilian music and electronic records to film soundtracks – remain deliberately submerged, fully absorbed into a self-contained sonic world.

Grumpy Pieces is not a break, but a sharpening. An album that further condenses and roughens the unmistakable sound of Harmonious Thelonious, offering an uneasy yet physical soundtrack to the current social climate. Dance music with teeth.

For more information, or to order, please access the Bureau B website.

About Bureau B
Bureau B is platform for exciting varieties of electronic, free-spirited music. The spectrum ranges from pop to avant-garde, and the label has amassed an impressive catalogue of reissues and new productions in recent years, including classics from the genre of electronic music in the 1970s and early 1980s popularly classified as Krautrock (Cluster, Roedelius, Moebius, Plank, Schnitzler), alongside new recordings by such formative artists as Faust, Kreidler, Roedelius, Tietchens, Moebius, to name just a few. Bureau B is based in Hamburg, Germany.