Photo courtesy of the artist
Living near the Baltic Sea, producer Christian Löffler makes music that sounds how a large body of water looks: vast, fluid, and brimming with wonder while possessing a murkiness and deep-down feeling of isolation. "All my music is connected by a gloomy spirit," he states in his bio.Löffler's balance of musical warmth and melancholy will again be on full display come October 7, when he releases his second album Mare on his own Ki Records. He made the LP while sequestering himself in a cabin by the Baltic Sea in Darss, Germany. Straying from the sample-based approach he took with his 2012 debut album, A Forest, Mare was inspired largely of organic field recordings he took while living in that cabin.Today, THUMP is premiering one of Mare's tracks, "Haul," featuring Löffler's longtime collaborator Mohna. The track is serene yet eerie, calmly rippling at the surface while swirling with complex layers underneath. Bring in Mohna's smoky vocals and crooning harmonies, and it's like wading into a placid lake at dusk."The meaning was not intended to be essentially different to A Forest," Löffler says, "but where the first album sometimes still felt to just be on the surface of what I can say with this project, it now feels like that I've come closer to the core of what I want to express."