Where your heart goes when you create such divine voices? 

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)

The Hour Of The Sleeping Stones

Oma's Keukentafel

Stream

if youre listening

spiaggia libera verde

Taken from the album 'Aster' released as 2LP and Download

Aster

Kassel Jaeger 'Rose Poussière' (EMEGO 235)

Release date: September 29th
Pre-order: https://lullabiesforinsomniacslabel.bandcamp.com/album/l-szl-hortob-gyi-transreplica-meccano

Hungarian composer and musicologist László Hortobágyi, took his first expedition to North India in the late 1960's to record music, study philosophy and learn traditional instruments such as the rudra-vina, sitar, surbahar and tabla. These ongoing trips heavily influenced his musical style and much of his recorded work. LFI is happy to announce the reincarnation of one of his most illustrious works, Transreplica Meccano originally released by Hungaropop in 1988. 

As a child László fantasised about interacting with otherworldly muses and imploring them for the hope and guidance he yearned to escape the intellectual bareness of his surroundings. His early feelings of alienation combined with the almost sensual pleasure he remembers from these interactions, influenced and helped shape his life long musical journey.  In 1980 he established the musical society called Gáyan Uttejak Mandal. It was named after the Hindu-Moslem musician's society founded by Navraojí Kabrají in 1870 (it was the school of the great musicologist, V.N Bhátkhánde).
The society expanded throughout the 1980’s with an archive of oriental music, to be considered unique and unrivalled in Eastern Europe, which has operated parallel to the Gáyan Uttejak Studio and the Gáyan Uttejak Orchestra. The members have made it their duty to practice and study the world heritage of traditional cultures. 

The remastered and revised edition of Transreplica Meccano is reborn after 31 years.     László weaves a tapestry of sample based magic, transcribed from travels across the orient, transporting the listener to a fascinating world of archaic musicality. His sound palette is rebuilt and restructured using PCM morphology and FFT spectrum analysis as well as virtual overtone, processing synthesis software he developed in 1988. 
The new live program's repertoire is based on the classical Indian instrumental technique of the Gáyaki-Ang and the Tablá-tárang polyrhythmic structure and is mixed with his developed sound morphology of the granular systhesis technique according to his original 'computed memesis of music' concept. The result is an incredible amalgamation of musical worlds, allow yourself to be immersed in a truly unique dialect.


L. Hortobagyi : ibm-pc, sampler, been, synths, tabla, sitar, vocoder
Nora Hortobagyi : voice, strings

P. Radvanyi : Sygnus modular-synth (on Cathedral of Reptiles)
Toto : bass
Goezi : pozauna 
Chipy : flute
(on Nono-bol)

Recorded in the Gayan Uttejak Studio, Budpest. 1986 
Remastered and revised by L.Hortobagyi in 2006

László Hortobágyi – Transreplica Meccano (LFI009) Preview

Fahmi Mursyid - Lautan

Folk music from another dimension by singular artist Kaboom Karavan and his new album "The Log and the Leeway", following a 6 year journey of personal exploration and drastic change. 

"The Log and the Leeway" is released 17th of July 2020 and features amongst others a bizarre cover painting by John Lurie (of The Lounge Lizards). It also comes with a 16 page booklet of musical illustrations by Walter Doogh & Erik K Skodvin that more or less connects and confuses the stories behind the record.

Red and Black LP editions.

The Log and the Leeway

Kaboom Karavan - Silk Skin Armor

in recent years, the turkish drone-pop composer ekin fil (born ekin üzeltüzenci) has been refining her talents in the realm of the film score. since her first recordings that were published by root strata and students of decay, she has always exhibited a preternatural ability to express the saddest of emotions through sound. once channeled through the lens of a gauzy shoegazing smear of guitars and voice, she has peeling away layers of her ephemeral songs to reveal their emotional core. that compositional process that works so well for her award winning film scores informs the soft-focus tenebrous pieces of her 2020 album coda. 

it’s true that any number of these pieces on this album could announce the finale to an emotionally draining movie, but ekin sculpts the entire album as a whole, dissolving one perfectly tempered piano motif, an impressionist ambient plume or a sibilant vocal melody into another. just at the threshold of perception, she occasionally invokes cascades of distant noise that easily can be interpreted as the ominous premonitions for natural disasters - incoming storms, earthquakes, or tidal waves. this subtle disquiet amidst the introspective melancholy furthers the emotional weightiness of coda.

her somber, blissful compositions have considerable gravity of their own in the constellation of grouper, felicia atkinson, and harold budd.

Coda

Ekin Fil // On Sand

On The Futility Of Existence

Various formats available at:
http://oejerum.bandcamp.com

On The Futility Of Existence

øjeRum

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