LAURIN HUBER, Dog Mountain, LP

Release date - July 30th 2021
Catalogue nr. - HG2199
Format - Vinyl / digital
Hallow Ground

hallowground.bandcamp.com

Tracklist:
1) Raja (04.59)
2) Nickel (05:50)
3) A Town Is Not A Town (04:54)
4) Storskog-Borisoglebsk (07:32)

Credits:
Composed and recorded by Laurin Huber
Mixed by Rolf Laureijs
Mastering by Lawrence English
Artwork by Michael Bodenmann

///
»Dog Mountain« is the second release by the Zurich-based producer and composer Laurin Huber on Hallow Ground. After last year’s »Juncture« saw the Edipo Re co-founder work mostly with synthesizers and programmed rhythms, the four tracks are much more restrained, drawing on tape loops and feedback, recordings of acoustic guitar and synthesizers such as the Korg MS-10 as well as field recordings that relate to the overarching topic that informed the making of the record. While »Juncture« had previously aimed at deconstructing the binaries and dualities that shape our lives and thinking, »Dog Mountain« is dedicated to geographical divisions that result from political processes and social constructions. »›Here‹ means one nation, ›there‹ another,« writes Huber in a literary piece that accompanies the record. »Being in sound, such a separation seems odd.« 

While treating the metaphor of the border as a »membrane, registering and translating the vibrations of its surroundings« and thus as something that is constantly (re-)defined, maintained and defended however, the artist also takes into consideration that »one cannot escape one’s standpoint,« as he puts it. The music on »Dog Mountain« may transcend and overcome certain borders, but it does not deny the realities that they impose on each and every one of us – whether in our political lives or in the realm of sound. This is mirrored in Huber’s engaging in the structural and sonic interplay of repetition and difference. Working with slowly evolving and modulating elements that are exposed to slight shifts, »Dog Mountain« puts a focus on the interaction between small elements that together form a bigger whole which is marked by constant evolution and change. 

Opener »Raja« (»border« in Northern Sami and Finnish) starts off with a two-note melody played on an out-of-tune guitar. Different field recordings and synthesizer sounds drop in and out of the mix until the dynamic shifts and Huber starts playing more notes on his instrument, thus increasing the tension. It’s a meditation on minimalism, but also a piece that mediates between notions of what constitutes the difference between noise and music or referentiality and abstraction in sound. After »Nickel« (named after a Russian monotown near the border to Norway) dedicates itself to explore the friction between hissing white noise and melancholic tape loops, »A Town Is Not a Town« (a phrase taken from the documentary »Kiruna – Rymdvägen«) structurally mirrors the experiment of »Raja« with very different sonic means. 

Closing the record, »Storskog-Borisoglebsk« (the title refers to the northernmost land border between Schengen-Europe and Russia) is the longest and most challenging piece, working with both long-form drones and musique concrète elements. It proposes a synthesis of the opposites that are explored patiently and with much attention to detail throughout this record.

LAURIN HUBER - A Town Is Not A Town (HG2199)

Good morning, good afternoon and good evening. Whatever part of the world you're in...

It's difficult to talk about sound. When we close our eyes and listen, there are no boundaries and as such, what we feel can often not be described with the words we know. Our feelings are unique & different.
There is no word or genre that unites the artists of the label. Putting a word on a style, in order to classify, takes part of the magic away. Instead, what unites us is our passion for sound, dancing with friends and growing together.

Hoping to see you soon and wishing you much love, music_is

Releases December 25, 2021, Digital & Tape (100 copies)
Pre-order: https://music-is.bandcamp.com/album/a-day-of-music
Mastered by Amandra
Art direction and design: Maison Sagan
Photo Credit: Alex Rodríguez Santibáñez

@music_is1 
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Ben Vida
Reducing The Tempo To Zero
SHELTER PRESS / SP108

Recorded 2016-2019 New York
Mastering: Stephan Mathieu
Artwork: Xavier Antin

The theme of time is unavoidable when approaching Ben Vida’s Reducing the Tempo to Zero, his latest endeavour with Shelter Press. A singe work, pushing the bounds of Digital and Analog Synthesis, which stretches to just over 4 hours in length, its realization is the product of years of effort - the process of recording and editing extending across the period between 2015 and 2019, offering momentary conclusion to an arc of ideas and practice which which first appeared on Damaged Particulates, issued in 2016.

RTTTZ is a temporal nesting doll - a meditation, conceived by Vida as a part of a daily practice which embarked upon sustained periods of focused creation and listening. While the product of a deeply personal, inward journey, similar to iconic efforts by composers like Dennis Johnson, La Monte Young, Morton Feldman, and Éliane Radigue, it strives to unravel the standards and expectations applied to musical and experiential time, taking the relation to sonic phenomena into an almost transcendental realm. Immersive in scale and endurance, through a deep and radical sensitivity to material and structural hybridity, Vida’s return to the durational drone based forms - first explored as a member of Town and Country during the mid-90s - drives the ear toward the solace found through developmental and intimate relationships with the fleeting, granular, and discrete, transmogrifying smallest detail into a monumental event.

Despite being the “complete” RTTTZ document, made concrete by the process of recording, this 4+ hour iteration carries the shifting ghosts of other beings and times. It represent only one of many possible, existing beside a free standing phonetic, text-based score, and a near infinite number of evolutionary, live variations - instrumental and vocal versions, as well as those which spring from the combination of instrumental and vocal ensembles of varying sizes, each time of different length, changing and taking on new dimensions determined by the its performers. In a sense, each version is simultaneously free-standing and finished, while capable of reconfiguration and being made anew - a mirror for its shifting passage through the ear, which triggers multiple, concurrent images of other times and existence of itself.

While the duration, structure, and relatively of RTTTZ focuses attention toward the internality of what it is, like all great art, they are simply a means to an end. The crucial themes lay with the cumulative effect of their sum - the power of phenomena and highly individualized experience. It is an organized, sonorous space which is to be occupied and within which to get lost, shifting the ownership, whether embarked upon actively or passively - both as valid and rewarding as the next - to the listener alone, sculpting a subjective expanse which denying concise location and, in so doing, undermines the presumption of the capacity to be the same thing twice.

Overwhelmingly beautiful in its oscillating harmonics and punctuation of pulsing texture and tone, each stage of its evolution moving at a glacial pace, represents a monumental achievement from Vida within the broad landscape of experimental and avant-garde sound. Reducing the Tempo to Zero was mastered by Stephan Mathieu, and is released by Shelter Press in both digital and limited USB card editions.

Reducing The Tempo To Zero

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HALLOW GROUND 
is a platform for Music and Art that leads to Visions.

It was established in Lucerne/Switzerland by a group of individualists, idealists and first of all artists. We act as publishers, hosts and performers.

www.hallowground.com

LAURIN HUBER - A Town Is Not A Town (HG2199)

Hallow Ground

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