*300 copies limited edition* More than twenty years of friendship haunt Vrhältnis, the new album by Antoine Chessex and Dave Phillips, out now on Coherent States and Krim Kram. Its source material reaches back twenty years, originating from live performances during a 2005 joint tour in Lausanne and Basel and a studio session recorded the same year at the Dynamo/Popkredit Studio in Zürich. Both sessions were then filed away, the recordings disappearing into the archive, untouched for nearly two decades, before resurfacing in 2025 and prompting both artists to return to them with fresh ears and renewed intent. The material was subsequently reworked, manipulated, layered and decomposed -in Zürich and in Thailand- into the two extended pieces that form this album. Iischtellig and Tüüfi unfold across an expanded temporal horizon, echoes and non-linear fragments reverberating between what was recorded, what was remembered, and what was made anew.
The strange ritual unfolding within Vrhältnis possesses a particular distant quality - the creators' specific gravity and distinct compositional traits concealed behind accumulating densities. Musique concrète with strong noise and heavy electronics elements is the obvious point of entry, yet the work exists under a mystical prism that embraces sonic naturalness, as if the sounds themselves carry a memory that predates their recording. Running through both pieces is a haunting vocal presence drawn from the Silvesterchlausen tradition of northeastern Switzerland -an ancient Alpine ritual of winter processions- raw and untethered, arriving from no fixed point, eerie and unmoored. Deep in the forest, spectral voices surface and dissolve. What time is it?
Antoine Chessex is a sound artist based in Zurich. Drawing on long-standing experience in experimental music and sonic arts since the late 1990s, his work engages sound and listening across multiple formats. Emerging from an early practice as an improvising saxophonist and a sustained investigation of noise within performance contexts, his work has traversed plural sonic territories. It has since evolved into a distinctly transversal practice moving between performance, installation, research, improvisation, and composition. Rooted in sonic intensity, Chessex's early experience as a solo performer and collaborator -including works with Zbigniew Karkowski, Jérôme Noetinger, and Valerio Tricoli- positioned him within international noise and avant-garde communities. As a founding member of the experimental noise-rock band Monno, he toured extensively across underground scenes while maintaining an active international practice as a solo artist. He has appeared at CTM Festival, Unsound, INA/GRM Présence Électronique, Issue Project Room, Berghain, and Café OTO, among others, and has released works on Tochnit Aleph, Fragment Factory, Editions Cave12, Musica Moderna, Bocian, and Rekem Records.
Dave Phillips is a sonic activist, composer, performer and core member of the legendary Schimpfluch-Gruppe alongside Rudolf Eb.er and Joke Lanz, a collective that has spent four decades wielding sound as a tool of metaphysics, protest and catharsis. Emerging from the radical tradition of Viennese Actionism and pushing it into the terrain of harsh noise, performance art and extreme sound, Schimpfluch-Gruppe remains one of the most uncompromising and influential collectives in the history of experimental music. Phillips' roots stretch back further still, to his co-founding of Swiss grindcore pioneers Fear Of God in the late 1980s. His solo work is as philosophical as it is visceral, rooted in a radical ecological and humanimal worldview that consistently positions the listener at the edge of civilisational discomfort. He has appeared at No Fun Fest, Colour Out Of Space, Liquid Architecture, Ende Tymes, Bergen International Festival and many others, and has released his music on Schimpfluch, Tochnit Aleph, Blossoming Noise, Ideal Recordings, Misanthropic Agenda and numerous other labels worldwide.
