Christian Löffler
Located on the Darss peninsular, overlooking the southern coast of the Baltic Sea, is a log cabin, nestled among the junglelike overgrowth of surrounding willow trees. The cabin is Christian Löffler’s atelier, where he locks himself up to work on both his visual art and his music. The place is very basic, working, sleeping, cooking, all in one room; yet it’s these modest parameters that allow Löffler to make sincere and honest music, concentrating on just the essentials.
‘Mare’ is his second studio album and follows in a similar vein to his selfreleased debut, 2011’s ‘A Forest’. However, a key difference is that while his first album was heavily samplebased, ‘Mare’ is much more organic, in which nearly every sound and every instrument is selfrecorded. Many of the album’s ideas are based on fieldrecordings taken from the surroundings. On top of this, several microphones were set up in the room and left to run on for whole sessions. The microphones collected everything, from tapping, singing, playing, footsteps, as well as percussive elements added on the fly such as bottles, sticks, a set of keys, or basically anything that was lying around. Sometimes he would open the sliding patio doors, where sounds from outside would blend into the mix.
The instrumentation, the setting, and the process, make ‘Mare’ a highly individual body of work that sees him expanding the limits of his setup. The LP features the highly emotive sound that Löffler’s become known for, using deep house as a stylistic framework with which to base his tracks. Exploring spaces of emotional and physical loss, getting lost, as well as arriving, he blends wistful melodies, drum machines, and found sounds into a wandering, melancholic mélange.