Luis Miehlich - Re-Cartographies (2024)

Luis Miehlich is a composer originally from Heidelberg in Southern Germany, who moved to the small town of Trossingen to study music design in a rural conservatory. He has previously released music through labels such as Archives, Hibernate, Inner Space Travels and also Whitelabrecs with Timecuts in 2019 and the final edition of our Home Diaries series back in 2020. He has also contributed to albums and compilations on eilean rec, Shimmering Mood Records, Ambientologist and El Muelle Records.

Through his studies, Luis has had the opportunity to develop formats for the concert hall and has been able to realise numerous concert projects, bringing together instrumentalists, experimenting with pieces from classical and early music, electronics and visuals. This developed into a further opportunity, in which he had the chance to perform live Ambient sets during a 3-stop mini-tour of japan. These live performances became the backbone of this album.

‘Re-Cartographies’ is based upon a three step process: first the music was sketched out to be played by an ensemble made up of fellow students. It was then rehearsed, developed and finally recorded. Luis then used these recordings to make new ambient pieces, using processing such as granular synthesis, rearranging and looping the material and using spatial effects.

The opening ‘Cartographies’ pieces developed upon the Home Diaries project, adding long silences to the approach to further explore the idea of slowing down time. Then around the same time, still during the Covid-19 pandemic, Luis started sketching small watercolour scores every morning. These later became the base for the two ‘Small Score’ tracks; photographs of these original paintings have been included inside the CD sleeve. These sketches left a lot of freedom to the musicians playing, only notating the contour and structure of the melodies to be played with no set pitches being specified. The charm of the resulting music stems from the fact that everyone interpreted the sketches differently.

At Trossingen, Luis became interested in revisiting these concepts and turning them into a concert programme and this album is made of music recorded in preparation for the concert, which had the subtitle Halbschlafkonzert, which translates to ‘half-asleep concert’. Luis enjoys the state of listening to music whilst almost dozing off to sleep, and wanted to create a stream of music that fits this somewhat subconscious listening-mode.

Whilst compiling the material for this album, Luis was trying to work with space: The pieces, or blocks, often start out very intimately and end in big ambient spaces. Often, artists will approach ambient music using either synthetic or reverb-led drones, or through more traditional sound sources such as Modern Classical sound. Luis wanted to combine dry chamber music and enveloping ambient in one record and the result is something which feels half-asleep, yet focused at the same time, as Luis aimed to slow down the world.