** 2025 Stock ** On Aare, Christian Kobi channels a lifetime’s fascination with sound beneath the river’s surface, translating the enigmatic interiority of underwater listening into a personal and finely detailed sonic journey. Drawing on memories of submerging in Bern’s Aare, the album forges a space where sine wave drones interface with the real, tactile presence of rippling water. These field recordings—soft, immersive, and texturally nuanced—act as both source and metaphor, situating the listener in the palpable current of Kobi's native landscape. The vinyl presents two evolving halves: the A-side remains close to the surface, with fragile, almost diaphanous sine tones that evoke the skin’s threshold between worlds; by the time the flip arrives, there is a movement into depth, as resonances gather and the beatings of sound feel more lively, shaped by the unpredictable, analog pulse of river flow.​

Kobi—a musician known for his dialogues with silence, spatial acoustics, and the radical contingency of improvisation—embraces the challenges of solo work here, never relinquishing the slender thread that connects form with fleeting detail. The album’s patience is deceiving: while it invites surrender, it ultimately rewards attentive listening, as minute sonic events rise, drift, and dissipate in cycles reminiscent of driftwood carried by the current. This approach, distilled through years of engagement with improvisation and experimental composition, foregrounds perception as much as performance. The sound world of Aare is neither strictly composed nor wholly surrendered to chance but exists in a liminal zone of deliberate flux, a direct echo of Kobi’s ethos as an artist—"there is no alternative to my own attitude.“