A.T.C. Records / Austria / 2025 / CS
With his seventh full-length release, Unterland, Austrian composer and sound artist Kobermann (Johannes Piller) presents a meditative counterpoint to a culture spinning ever faster — one where the next reel, the next drop, and the next dopamine hit scream for attention. Unterland withdraws from this dynamic, offering instead a deep, slow-burning exploration of repetition, space, and sonic ritual.
Created primarily using modular synthesizers, field recordings, and minimal post-processing, the album moves between ambient, dub, and avant-garde minimalism, drawing influence from early New Age cassettes, contemporary drone practices, and tape-saturated club ghosts. But more than genre, Unterland is a terrain — an imagined topography where each track marks a physical and emotional waypoint.
The 60-minute journey begins with Waves, where blurred field recordings and gently detuned drones wash over the listener like fog over a valley. A child’s voice introduces the piece, speaking of “huge waves” — a fitting metaphor for the undulating nature of what follows.
The 23-minute Hokus Pokus becomes the album’s gravitational core. It’s less a composition than a space to inhabit: modular sequences, feedback loops, and noise textures evolve gradually, encouraging listeners to surrender to a slower sense of time. It’s an invitation to recalibrate — to listen in a way modern life rarely allows.
Alebrijes follows as a surreal, protective presence: ghostly rhythms, laugh-like tones, and deconstructed dub pulses drift through the mix like dream-guardians.
The B-side opens with Strobe Pad, where shimmering pads, panned percussion, and reverb-drenched harmonics suggest a moment of clarity — a brief emergence from the murk. The track serves as a light source before the final descent into abstraction.
Small Cases and Unfold mark a psychological ascent: from the minimalist weightlessness of travel into the oxygen-thin air of revelation. Granular textures and filtered drones evoke both euphoria and disorientation — the moment after a summit, when the world reshapes itself around your breath.
The closing track, Future Schmelz, places the listener at a glacial edge, where crumbling drums and filtered sequences collapse into a dance of entropy. Delayed hats, decaying Moog DFAM sequences, and feedback bursts create a post-dub atmosphere — as if memory itself were dissolving.
All seven pieces were composed and recorded between February 2024 and February 2025 using a modular system, recorded and arranged in Ableton Live.