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)

Otherwise Than Being

Mares

Bleu Précieux is a body of work that traces the contours of memory, movement and place. Composed entirely in meantone temperament for modular and hardware synthesizers, the album unfolds like an organism: branching, adapting, responding. Many of its processes emerge from generative systems rooted in the natural world, where structure and unpredictability coexist.

The album began with Signaux, a piece that translates real-time plant biofeedback into control voltage, allowing living organisms to shape melody and timbre. What begins as signal becomes emotion. The boundaries between composer, instrument and environment dissolve. Nature appears here as a collaborator, not as a backdrop.

These sounds carry traces of elsewhere: the sulphurous nights of Kipatauw, the hushed forests of the North, the Golden Mountain and hidden pathways, the Sleeping Giant and frozen lakes. Years spent crossing landscapes and languages have shaped this music into a living being.

The visual world of Bleu Précieux is rooted in 3D-scanned fragments of the Estonian forest, which form the basis of the album’s design and the animated video for the title track. Each piece tells its story differently. In Unfold, photographs are reanimated into a dreamlike sequence of memory and return. Signaux captures close-ups of nature, light, texture and motion. Together, these visual companions form a blend of techniques and impressions, a quiet archive of places lived through and dreams carried forward.

Recorded between 2022 and 2025.
Carefully constructed. Quietly alive.
Not an arrival, but a return. 

All music composed and produced by Sander Saarmets
Mastered by Margus Löve
Artwork by Sander Saarmets
Design by Mauno Meesit

Supported by the Cultural Endowment of Estonia
and the Estonian Authors’ Society

© 2025 Glitch Please

Exhaler

Taken from album 'Heaven' released as LP and Digital

Heaven

Dino Spiluttini 'Touch Isolation' (EMEGO 266)

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

The Sea Was In The Sun And The Sun A Grain Of Dust In A Dream

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.

On The Futility Of Existence

øjeRum