Christian Kobi
Aare (2023)
item number CR378
Limited Vinyl Edition
Release December 3, 2023
buy it on bandcamp
About Christian Kobi
His work explores the relationship between sound, silence and action in space. He studied music in Basel, Paris and Zuerich, with a concentration in experimental music and improvisation. Kobi performs and creates with various musicians, composers and artists in context of long term partnerships with artists such as Phill Niblock, Jürg Frey, Taku Sugimoto and Keith Rowe. Since 2004 he curates the „zoom in“ festival for improvised music. Christian Kobi teaches improvisation at the Bern University of Arts (HKB).
Audio
Aare
Track A : 18min 50s
Track B : 20min 35s
Excerpt from Track A
About «Aare»
“Since my childhood I have been interested in listening under water. That’s exactly what we do every summer in Bern, when we dive into the river Aare. A universe of sounds opens up.”
Press
The mixture is really fascinating, both levels, water sounds and sine waves have something big, long-term, but also something microscopic through the beatings or the many smallest events in the water - in the superimposition you have the possibility to take very different auditory perspectives, resp. If you simply let your ears drift, you sometimes notice only after a few minutes that your own perspective has shifted and something else has come to the fore, but here, with you, a completely different level comes into play with the field recording, which creates new kinds of interference.
What is exciting about the first piece is that, especially towards the end with the gurgling to rippling sounds, it gives the impression of being extremely close to the surface of the water: it becomes very "thin-skinned" and one has the feeling of being torn out of this world at any moment. With this, the more constant sine tones shift imaginarily into a depth range, far away from this "surface". In the second piece I hear it the other way around, there I experience the water as a stronger continuum and the beatings of the sine tones as more lively, more mobile: Here the beatings "float" above the surface of the water and sometimes conversely one has the impression as if the water noise would form certain resonances and would be rhythmically influenced by the beatings. The beats thus act here like a perceptual filter on the noise, whereas in the first recording it was rather the noise that acted as a surface in front of the sine waves behind it.
Michel Roth, September 2023