🌑 Another stellar new roster recruits to unveil: we welcome artists Delphine Dora and Jérôme Bouve to Hallow Ground’s fold.
Jérôme Bouve and Delphine Dora’s collaborative album builds on recordings with organs and harmoniums in various churches around Normandy and was enriched with field recordings. Both overwhelming and intimate, »vents d’aether« constructs a dialogue between the instruments and the different churches which became resonant bodies for the improvised music.
‚𝒗𝒆𝒏𝒕𝒔 𝒅’𝒂𝒆𝒕𝒉𝒆𝒓‘ 𝒊𝒔 𝒂 𝒃𝒍𝒖𝒔𝒕𝒆𝒓𝒚 𝒂𝒏𝒅 𝒔𝒖𝒃𝒍𝒊𝒎𝒆𝒍𝒚 𝒃𝒆𝒂𝒖𝒕𝒊𝒇𝒖𝒍 𝒎𝒆𝒍𝒂𝒏𝒈𝒆 𝒐𝒇 𝒘𝒊𝒅𝒆𝒔𝒄𝒓𝒆𝒆𝒏 𝒆𝒏𝒗𝒊𝒓𝒐𝒏𝒎𝒆𝒏𝒕𝒂𝒍 𝒓𝒆𝒄𝒐𝒓𝒅𝒊𝒏𝒈𝒔 𝒂𝒏𝒅 𝒖𝒏𝒔𝒆𝒕𝒕𝒍𝒊𝒏𝒈 𝒌𝒂𝒍𝒆𝒊𝒅𝒐𝒔𝒄𝒐𝒑𝒊𝒄 𝒅𝒓𝒐𝒏𝒆𝒔 𝒕𝒉𝒂𝒕 𝒇𝒖𝒍𝒍𝒚 𝒔𝒕𝒐𝒑𝒔 𝒕𝒊𝒎𝒆. (Boomkat)
Miloš Hroch wrote a wonderful portrait of Delphine Dora in the newest WIRE issue
Get your copy: thewire.co.uk/issues/507
🌝
Thomas Peter - changing bodies
Out now!
„A musical universe of unsettling aberrations, between brief yet crucial silences and convulsions of electronic sounds.“
~
Thomas Peter’s »changing bodies« is inspired by the resonance and reaction of objects with and to sound. Working with sounds generated with various materials, field recordings, and an array of analogue and digital synthesizers, The Swiss composer created five ever-shifting pieces full of twists and turns in which even silence plays a significant role.
~
Listen / buy:
hallowground.com
~
Credits:
Music by Thomas Peter
Mastered by Tomas Korber
Cut by Andreas Lupo Lubich
Cover photography by Olivia Wiederkehr
Design by Remo Seeland
@oliviawiederkehr@lupo_lubich@_thomaspeter_@hallowgroundlabel
◯
CoH & Wladimir Schall, COVERS, LP
Ltd. Art Edition with Handcrafted Covers
200 copies
Mastering and cut by Andreas Lupo Lubich
hallowground.bandcamp.com
The one thing that you cannot expect from an album called »COVERS« by electronic music polymath Ivan Pavlov a.k.a. CoH and the mysterious Wladimir Schall is a simple covers album, though both Pavlov and Schall have paid tribute to their favourites before. The former has recorded an album dedicated to the late John Everall, released in 2017 through Hallow Ground as »CoH Plays Everall,« and the latter has put out an endlessly looping cassette in 2020 with his take on Satie’s »Vexations.« Much like on these records, the two multi-media artists are not content with the mere reinterpretation of their source material, but strive to reimagine it. According to them, the seven pieces on »COVERS« were conceived as »a series of manoeuvres with an ambition to expose the machinery of Music in detail and with utter honesty, without making up for the faults of its traditional instruments or of the compositions themselves.«
@hallowgroundlabel@frankie_go_insta@wladimir.schall@lupo_lubich
Awesome to teaming up again with Ivan Pavlov and announce his new collaboration with pianist Wladimir Schall right for the celebration of this year’s winter solstice.
With little more than a piano and electronic processing, the two idiosyncratic artists reimagine music by Erik Satie, Ryūichi Sakamoto, Sergei Rachmaninoff, and others. »COVERS« is not simply a covers album, but a radical interrogation of memory.
The beautiful and fragile sounds are reflected in the carefully handcrafted artwork made by the artists.
CoH & Wladimir Schall, COVERS, LP
Ltd. Art Edition with Handcrafted Covers
Mastering and cut by Andreas Lupo Lubich
hallowground.bandcamp.com
@frankie_go_insta@wladimir.schall@lupo_lubich
⛰︎ ོ ༄
RAPHAEL LOHER
Hug of Gravity 2LP
Ltd. art editions
Raphael Loher is an outstanding Swiss pianist and composer who expands the piano with preparations as well as the use of electronic effects and tape machines. In his music, he deals with the presence of sound and its concentrated reduction.
The source material for these four sprawling pieces was culled from recordings of the artist performing the album’s predecessor, 2022’s »Keemuun.« Loher used them in a painstaking two-part working process to create an album that is both a product of and an ode to transformation, exploring themes of alternative temporalities and spatialities.
»Hug of Gravity« oscillates between experimental electronic music, ambient, and minimal music and calls to mind the work of artists like William Basinski, Linda Catlin Smith, or label mate Andrius Arutiunian.
Credits
All music and artwork by
Raphael Loher @raphael.loher
Mastered by Manuel Egger
Lacquer cut by LUPO @lupo_lubich
Design by Dorothee Dähler @dddahler
and Kaj Lehmann @kplehmann
Released by Hallow Ground
@hallowgroundlabel
Look at this beauty! Matthias Puech’s second album for Hallow Ground, »La Traversée«, will be out on November 14. Limited to 200 copies on black vinyl.
Profoundly inspired by re-reading Homer’s »The Odyssey,« the French composer, instrument designer, and scholar used a Eurorack modular synthesizer to create four pieces that are by far the most intuitive and emotionally charged in his ever-expanding catalogue. Puech’s masterful command of sound comes to the forefront with even more urgency on this record. A wandering meditation on the human condition, »La Traversée« is an album that is constantly in motion—complex electronic music at its most gripping and evocative.
hallowground.com
Composed, recorded and mixed by Matthias Puech @mqtthiqs
Mastered by Giuseppe Ielasi @senufoeditions
Cover: excerpt from J. M. W. Turner, Snow Storm: Steam-Boat off a Harbour’s Mouth (1842)
Drawing by Matthias Puech @mqtthiqs
💨
Matthias Puech: La Traversée (HG2505)
Pre-order now:
hallowground.bandcamp.com
Profoundly inspired by re-reading »The Odyssey,« Matthias Puech works with a Eurorack modular synthesizer to create four pieces that are by far the most intuitive and emotionally charged in his ever-expanding catalogue. A wandering meditation on the human condition, »La Traversée« is an album that is constantly in motion—complex electronic music at its most gripping and evocative.
/// black vinyl, ltd. to 200 ///
Composed, recorded and mixed by Matthias Puech @mqtthiqs
Mastered by Giuseppe Ielasi @senufoeditions
Cover: excerpt from J. M. W. Turner, Snow Storm: Steam-Boat off a Harbour’s Mouth (1842)
Drawing by Matthias Puech
📸 by Nils Maisonneuve
🐐🐐
MARTINA BERTHER / PHILIPP SCHLOTTER
Silence Will Never Die, LP
Limited White Vinyl
Incl. 12“ Inlay and A6 Postcard / Digital
Hallowground.com
@hallowgroundlabel
Martina Berther and Philipp Schlotter return to Hallow Ground with their second collaborative album since 2023’s stringent exercise in drone minimalism, »Matt.« »Silence Will Never Die« was recorded at the same church in the Canton of Glarus that lent its name to the duo’s debut. Once more the Church of Matt’s organ plays a significant role on these five pieces that navigate between composition and improvisation. However, the two prolific musicians aimed for an even more diverse sonic and stylistic palette. They brought new instruments into the fold to record an album that marries subtlety with complexity, the ephemeral with corporality.
These five pieces are »auditive microcosms that carry a calm but concentrated energy within them, that are repetitive and result from our bodies’ movements,« as Schlotter and Berther put it. »Silence Will Never Die« is as ethereal as it is visceral.
The two prolific musicians use their joint project to ask fundamental questions. The conceptual underpinnings of »Silence Will Never Die« emerged from improvisations and conversations between them. »How can we recharge our batteries so that we can contribute to society with as much positive energy as possible?« became their leading question, and the pair utilised more means than before to formulate musical answers to it.
Credits:
Martina Berther – bass, organ, synthesizer
Philipp Schlotter – synthesizer, organ, zither
Recording and zither support on Lookout: Flo Götte
Oreille extérieure and organ support on Eternal Youth: Anuk Schmelcher
Mixing and mastering: Lawrence English at Negative Space @room40shoots
Cover photo: Tom Huber / Connected Archives @_tom_huber
Band photo: Tom Huber
Design: Remo Seeland
⛰︎ ོ ༄
A stellar new roster recruits to unveil: we welcome artist Raphael Loher to Hallow Ground’s fold.
Raphael Loher is an outstanding Swiss pianist and composer who expands the piano with preparations as well as the use of electronic effects and tape machines. In his music, he deals with the presence of sound and its concentrated reduction.
Loher is a member of the groups KALI Trio and Baumschule and performs as a pianist in various constellations. His work combines elements of experimental electronic music, ambient, and minimal music.
The pianist spends a lot of time in the mountains and with the practice of meditation, shaping his awareness of the present. Extensive tours provide him with opportunities to explore physical limits and sharpen his senses in order to perceive the subtle changes in his surroundings and within himself. This forms the foundation of a practice that impacts his artistic work: conscious reduction, focused movement, and a heightened awareness of subtle shifts. »Being alone in the mountains has changed my perception of time. In this setting, time expands and changes its character. This expanded temporality, as I like to call it, is important for my music.«
»Hug of Gravity« is the second solo album by Raphael Loher and his first for Hallow Ground.
Releases October 17th, 2025
Pre-order ltd. vinyl art edition and listen to the first track
⛰︎ ོ ༄
Portrait by Jana Leu
Drawing by Raphael Loher
@raphael.loher@hallowgroundlabel
New-In: Giuseppe Ielasi in the front of house (and possibly warranting his own section divider, the maestro!!)
Black Truffle’s latest, _The Vestige_, documents a new intergenerational collaboration between Ielasi and Jack Sheen, a young composer-conductor-sound artist from Manchester whose recent projects have seen him moving seamlessly from chamber music and installations to conducting the London Symphony Orchestra!! The one-sheet reads, “using irregular repetition and cyclical forms to create structures at once alive with activity and almost static, as well as a rigorous exploration of spatial diffusion and the interaction of sound event and environment.”
This description recalls our favorite Illesai release, FAITICHE’s _Rhetorical Islands_, originally released on Ielasi’s Senufo Editions as a CD in 2012. This CD was our introduction to Ielasi and features recordings made in 2011 as a commission for l’Audible Festival, Paris, totally plastic acoustic events that feel mildly hallucinagenitic. Highest recommendation!!!
_ With Time, We Learned To Ask Less_ (2025) is the first duo album by Giuseppe Ielasi and Riccardo D. Wanke courtesy of the Swiss Hallow Ground imprint. Working with only electric guitar and electric piano as well as a gentle dose of reverb, these improvisation-based recordings showcase “attention to detail, and shared desire to sculpt space through music instead of just occupying it.” Both were members of the group Medves together with Andrea Belfi, Renato Rinaldi, and Stefano Pilia before Wanke relocated to Lisbon.
_Down On Darkened Meetings_ (Black Truffle, 2023)
And _Parallel/Grayscale_ is the first collaborative work between Ielasi and French-Swiss composer and electroacoustic musician Kassel Jaeger aka GRM’s François Bonnet!
Move in the direction of psychoacoustics & sound design folks, enough w/ the #nursewithwound esoterica
Cc:
@jackfrsheen@riccardowanke@senufoeditions@jan.j.elinek@hallowgroundlabel@editionsmego@kasseljaeger
