Out on Group Therapy Vol. 2 https://grouptherapycollective.bandcamp.com/album/group-therapy-vol-2

Riverbed

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)

Taken from the album 'Piano Muisc 1-7' released as LP, CD and digital.


Editions Mego is proud to welcome Powell to its roster with a bizarre and strangely emotive new LP of synthetic computer works entitled Piano Music 1-7.

Via his own Diagonal Records imprint, his work on XL Recordings and, most recently, the opening of audio/film platform A Folder [afolder.studio], Powell has firm footing in the contemporary electronic landscape. During a wry and obstinate musical life he has twisted myriad synthetic forms into shapes that explore and expand upon the districts of post-punk, techno, noise + computer music, and in the the last year alone he has released four albums of hi-def abstractions, each inspired by a formalisation of music proposed by Iannis Xenakis. 

As an extension of this intense period of work/research/play with stochastic functions [using probabilities to compose music], various processes emerged that Powell then began to apply to more traditional musical events. Where ordinarily in his work the probabilities and relationships are used to define parameters such as wave-shape, folding, FM, filter modes etc., he now began to use them to create musical formations and visual scores that could be played back using any software/MIDI instrument [one of these can be seen on the rear cover of the LP release]. While mapping out this cartography of relations, he used a basic Grand Steinway sampler as a placeholder instrument; the longer the process went on, though, the more he began to embrace the acoustic properties of the synthetic piano and make it the bedrock for this new constellation of work. 

Piano Music 1-7, subtitled ‘Music for Synthetic Piano and Assorted Electronics’, consists of seven different synthetic islands strung together into a single composition. All were composed using the aforementioned processes that allowed Powell to play a piano, even if he never learned to do so with his hands. After all, ’In writing electronic music,’ Robin Mackay once wrote, ‘you also have to direct the invention of new tools.’

At times the piano skips gleefully over shadowing synthesis, whilst at others the synthetic sheets swarm and envelope the keys. The interplay between the two create a fantastical alternate reality, a cosmic machine in which time is eroded, shrunk and expanded, like a wax upon which operations and relations are inscribed or engraved. Many of the pieces express a playfulness or optimism verging on vitalism, as bundles of piano notes dance and interpolate with a never-repeating range of electronic gestures. The feel is of a brightly coloured flower-bed in various stage of bloom. This interplay of the [artifical] acoustic and the electronic builds on the pioneering processes developed by David Behrman in works such as Leapday Night, and Piano Music 1-7 could also be posited as a modern take on Conlon Nancarrow’s investigations for player piano. Similarly, the razor-sharp sonic properties and unfolding of non-human events recall the computer works of Xenakis and the surgical precision of Mego mainstay Florian Hecker.

Recorded in late 2020, these new Powell works propose not just a bold and bright vision of electronic music but serve also as a map with which, for 35 minutes at least, we can navigate our way out of the current milieu. As the artist himself remarks in the sleeve-notes, ‘. . . What emerged from this fog or soup [for me] were ideas and processes that felt affirmative and life giving — sensations I had always hoped to convey in my music. Perhaps the optimism or positivity I felt at these musical events unfolding, these clusters and knots tumbling in different directions across time, can also be felt by you.’

Music for Synthetic Piano and Assorted Electronics

Composed and recorded by Powell, 2020
Mixed by Powell and Tobin Jones at The Park Studios, London
Mastered by Russell Haswell

Art direction by Guy Featherstone
Photography by John Cronin

Powell 'Piano Music #1' (EMEGO 301)

ETHEREAL AMBIENT SOUNDSCAPES INSPIRED BY GAME OF THRONES AND THE  LORD OF THE RINGS AND MANY OTHERS. RELAX, ENJOY AND DRIFT AWAY.

ETHEREAL: FAREWELL AND SORROW

Ambient jam recorded 17/08/2025 w/ Isaac Robertson and Leo Turton.

Glare

OG version by @motiongraphics from his record out now on @dominorecordco check http://motiongraphics.news for more info.

(Image: Esprit House by Shiro Kuramata)

Motion Graphics - Mezzotint Gliss (Visible Cloaks Remix)

Degradation Loops was a 16 day composition that gradually and completely 'bit crushes' my 2015 album Yellow Bell. Produced for a group show at the 55 Sydenham Rd, Marrickville gallery in Sydney, a process of sonic destruction unfolds in response to visual artists destroying and reassembling their work, to create new work, and to question the dominance of commercial imperatives within art. Here is a 14'48" time lapse edit of the 16 day composition, 2016.

Degradation Loops_55 Sydenham Rd Marrickville

Fahmi Mursyid - Lautan

Ka Baird - Symanimagenic

RVNGNL57

Full album available October 25, 2019

smarturl.it/rvngnl61

Respires

Symanimagenic

Ka Baird - Symanimagenic

@kabinw
info: https://radio.syg.ma/episodes/guests-98-air-krew
https://airkrew.bandcamp.com

GUESTS 98 – Air Krew

Dripping Rain (from Flowering Tree, Distant Moon. Coming out on April 30, Not Not Fun Records)
https://masahirotakahashi.bandcamp.com/album/flowering-tree-distant-moon-2

Dripping Rain (from Flowering Tree, Distant Moon. Coming out on April 30, Not Not Fun Records)

Based in Toronto.
New LP "Humis Sun" is coming out on March 31 on Telephone Explosion Record.


Past Shows: 
5/21 @Corpi sonori, Vilnius, Lithuania (Online)

3/10 @ Tranzac, Toronto

2/7 @ La lumière collective, Montreal
w/ Sometime people

11/10 @ Extrapool, Nijmegen, Netherland 

11/4 @ Temple, Tokyo (in Takao band)
w/Laraaji (from USA), Chee shimizu

10/27 @Chifuriguri, Sendai
w/Tsubasa Uchida etc

10/6 @Kyokusen, Sendai
w/H.Takahashi

7/10 @ Mitaka scool, Tokyo (in Takao band)
w/mmm

6/1 @Fall, Nishiogikubo,Tokyo
なnD launch Party

5/24 @Shibuya 7th floor, Tokyo
w/Joni Void (Canada), JANGMYUNGSUN (Korea), Metronori

5/18 @Nishiobikugo uchi, Tokyo
w/7FO, Metronori, Y. Ohashi

4/21@Amalab, Tokyo

4/10@Shibuya 7th Floor, Tokyo

3/29@Jyunbichu, Tokyo

3/20@Asagaya Ten, Tokyo

1/23 @Forestlimit, Tokyo
K/A/T/O Massacre 
w/Emerald four, Tajima Haruko, Meijin, Le Perry
 
1/7 @Liquid room (in Takao band)
w/Shuta Hasunuma

12/4 @Forest limit, Tokyo
w/ 幡ヶ谷ちっちゃいものクラブ、miku-mari, sofheso, werid-meddle, AKIRAM EN

12/1 @Uchi, Tokyo
w/ H.Takahashi, Hegira Moya, Takao

Dripping Rain (from Flowering Tree, Distant Moon. Coming out on April 30, Not Not Fun Records)

Masahiro Takahashi