Building on the back of his widely heralded LP, Juncture, from 2020, the Zurich-based composer, Laurin Huber, returns with Dog Mountain, his second outing with Hallow Ground. Built from a subtle pallet of guitar, synthesizers, and field recording, its four restrained works weave a deeply conceptual sense of space and geographic displacement within sprawling ambiences and subtle electroacoustic intervention.

First emerging within the electronic outfit, Wavering Hands, during the 2010s, as well as releasing solo efforts under the moniker, R.E.R., Laurin Huber has been a celebrated artist in Switzerland for a number of years, but it wasn’t until his 2020 LP, Juncture - the first issued under his own name - that the rest of the world got a glimpse of his formidable skills. His latest, Dog Mountain, strays into far more subtle and abstract realms, leaving behind its predecessor's rhythmic elements and musical synth lines, for sheets of pulsing drone, texture, and the graceful interlacing of delicate harmonic tones.

While easily overlooked in the face of its intricate and immersive beauty, Dog Mountain is a conceptual work, pregnant with ideas. In an era marked by difference and division, it was conceived by Huber as a meditation on the potential of sound to transcend and overcome certain borders, be they geographic, social, or political, a concept that is structurally illuminated by his deployment of repetition and difference, within cohesive, sonorous bodies that define the album’s length.

Built from slowly evolving, modulating elements of guitar, synthesizers, and field recording, Dog Mountain draws focus toward the interaction between small elements and subtle interplay, as well as their meaning and presence within a larger whole. The album’s 4 discrete compositions - ‘Raja’, ‘Nickel’, ‘A Town Is Not a Town’, ‘Kiruna - Rymdvägen’ - hint toward this through their titles, all of which are drawn from a specific geography or notion of place at odds with itself, while the album’s immersive sense of ambience binds them within sweeping space and minimalist meditations constructed from delicate harmonics, long tones, white noise, electronics, traces of the natural world, and melancholic tape loops.

Engrossing, surprising, and mesmerizing from start to finish, Dog Mountain encounters Huber pushing into new territories that embrace abstraction and topical concepts with dazzling skill, and is arguably his best record to date.