solology

sacred fear inspo

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)

live set recorded for room2.fm online show on October 8, 2021. a mix of new and old fav textures (shiny, silky, swishy, fuzzy, hissy) and an ode to the sea, which I miss because my lockdown radius doesn't reach.
Thankyou to Raag Bhatia and Patrick Hase for hosting, designing and curating the room2.fm events.

Room2.fm Live Set

TDA034 - Waiting For Albert [sample]

Ghost 15 : Magnetic Coroner - Spectral Doppelganger cs

Magnetic Coroner - Cloned Ghost 1

Taken from the compendium coffin closer release from Pat Klassen’s Barn Sour project. A project where the batshit crazy defies the beautiful whilst relishing in unease. Animals appear as phantasms, humans expel intense emotional states. Borderline music and borderline funny this is not for the faint of heart. Soap and Glue collages material from all six Barn Sour releases on a variety of labels, Staighre, Careful Catalog, 72 Fold Mane etc alongside a small sprinkling of exclusive material. The final Barn Sour release is the ultimate Barn Sour release and all you need to engage with one of the most twisted outfits to emerge from the underground in recent years.

Barn Sour - Soap & Glue (excerpt)

Excerpt from split tape "Forest Ritual" by Instinct Primal and Purba


Reaching Kutna Hora by Prague I had the chance to travel the countryside of Bohemia. Trees, forest, and finally the bones of Sedlec. A sort of ritual, walking among the trees to find the glacial white Kutna Hora ossuary.
"Forest Ritual" is an aural testament of a place where death and life becomes a single entity. 

Instinct Primal and Purba join this dark walk to create an aural experience of bones, cosmic connections, trees, stones and ancient spirituality.

Side one was recorded during the day in a snow storm, side two was recorded over midnight during a full moon in a silent forest. Fire and ice, day and night, light and dark, white and black.

C20 clear gold tape with 2 large inserts and 8 postcards, all the photos are conceived for this release. Everything is wrapped around by a shroud.

Instinct Primal & Purba "Forest Ritual" sample

Upperground Orchestra - Kaigo
from the album "Euganea" expected October 2019.

Composed and performed by Upperground Orchestra
Piero Bittolo Bon: Alto Sax, Bass Clarinet, FLute, Electronics
Alvise Seggi: Bass, Oud
Tommaso Cappellato: Drums, Percussions
Rabih Beaini: Spatula, Electronics.

Recorded by Max Trisotto at Villa dei Vescovi, Luvignano di Torreglia in June 2016 during the residency "Musica Veneta" with the kind support of FAI, Fondo Ambiente Italiano.
Produced, Mixed and Arranged by Rabih Beaini - Mastered by Neel at Enisslab. Cover Artwork by George Sowden - Designed by M-L-XL.

doser033LP - Morphine Records 2019
All rights reserved to the respective owners.

Upperground Orchestra is the hybrid Jazz band of Rabih Beaini and his fellow musicians Tommaso Cappellato (drums), Piero Bittolo Bon (woodwinds/electronics) and Alvise Seggi (Bass / Oud). The band is returns with a new LP, years after "The Eupen Tapes". Euganea is a 5 tracks LP recorded during the Musica Veneta residency, promoted by FAI (Fondo Ambiente Italiano) in the great context of Villa dei Vescovi. Working around Veneto music, the band developed pieces that merge deep roots of original fusion (tape music, electronics and synths, processing) with the free spiritual jazz sound of Upperground Orchestra.

Upperground Orchestra - Kaigo (doser033LP preview)

composed by miki yui presented at Donaueschingen Festival in 2007 as part of sound walk project

Fonan

from the 1st album "small souds" 1999.
recording of black mong of north vietnam singing, 
recorded and composed by miki yui.



Mong

Since late 2009 we have developed compositions using a modified boombox – a tape loop machine that records and plays back simultaneously. Sounds that enter it are released within seconds, sounding gentle feedback. Our first compositions using this boombox and a shruti box marked the beginnings of our collaboration as Coppice, and a phase of up-close entwinement of both instruments in decidedly quiet gestures. Since then, we have expanded our dynamic palette and range of instrumentation to include more bellowed instruments, custom instruments and other electronic processes.

Last Fall, we began imagining what has become Pied, a composition for tape, pump organ and the boombox. Its form contrasts the tapes’ fibrous processing with the more tabular appearances of microtonal pump organ transpositions – performed quietly but loudly amplified to bring out interferences and resonances by means of the original microphone techniques.

On one hand, Pied is a stark display of our sounds as solo artists, but in a borderline duet: five pump organ sections (recorded in Summer 2011 at Fljótstunga, Iceland) alternating with their boombox mediation and trails.

On the other hand, developing this piece at High Concept Laboratories has been a careful and entangled collaborative process, working directly with tape, scoring multiple generations of processing, and using a variety of acoustic resonators for coloration.

Although our compositional ideas may be fixed, the boombox’s response to these ideas is inherently oracular. Sections of Pied switch between several takes of the same content on tape, each sounding completely different from the other. We decided to keep many sonic incidentals and utterances across the many coats of the boombox’s reflections, also as a way to reveal the audible transparencies in the tape that didn’t erase. Towards the end of the piece, a snippet of our piece Seam seeps through the layers—which may be a recording from a performance in November of last year.

It is in this dendritic way that our work continues to develop, with fractions of past works refracted, and with certain sonic aspects highlighted at the expense of others.

Coppice (Noé Cuéllar & Joseph Kramer)
February 2012

Excerpt from "Pied" [2013] by Coppice

The most daring, audacious and amazing record label on the planet - Le Monde

Barn Sour - Soap & Glue (excerpt)

Penultimate Press