Oberst & Buchner release sophomore album ‘Marble Arch’

The 10-track album is a mixture of electronic synthesis, organic instrumentals, and field recordings

Oberst & Buchner

The stunning new album Marble Arch by the Vienna and Berlin-based production duo Oberst & Buchner is available right now via Heimlich Musik.

A grainy ball is struck by clear water. When it ultimately lands on a candle, the stream has been gently dissolving and flowing down the spherical structure. The flame goes out, and thin smoke sprigs rise before striking the massive globe’s rough surface once more. The cover art to Marble Arch, the second long-player of Vienna- and Berlin-based artists Oberst & Buchner, masterfully depicts the dramatic juxtapositions the musicians have always been reflecting in their musical outcome.

A huge sound wall’s tremendous density is in stark contrast to its wide openness. Massive, pitch-black clouds are bursting with delicate tonal subtleties. The tracks range in style from throbbing dark disco over traditional pop to experimental ambient, and they are full of soft warmth and frigid roughness, dazzling digital clarity, and deep analog crackle.

The duo’s two-week artist residency in a 250-year-old house, located in the mystic landscape of the Bavarian woods set this specific mood for the 10-track album which became a mixture of electronic synthesis, organic instrumentals, and field recordings. The distinctive elements that made up Marble Arch’s sound were its heavyweight basslines, bittersweet symphonic music, and the minute details of its percussion recordings and drum programming.

The dramatic arcs of suspense that Oberst & Buchner create in their song structures, in a style that is almost classical, are how they deal with stress. They always oscillate between ascent and explosion or implosion and fall in their very dynamic arrangements. In a similar manner to the cover art, the compositions throughout the long player take on the theme of creation and destruction. Taken together, all these fragments form the duo`s signature cinematic articulation of dramatic slowed-down club music and moments of surprise.

Marble Arch by Oberst & Buchner is currently available at Heimlich Musik.

Oberst & Buchner - Freie Sicht feat. Acud (Official Video)

About the artists: Oberst & Buchner

Berlin and Vienna-based musicians Oberst & Buchner are good friends. They reflect on a shared musical journey that spans more than 15 years and is as varied and rich in content as it is long. For one thing, countless high-energy DJ sets in clubs and at festivals all over Europe in recent years have earned them a reputation as a dynamic duo infernale. Additionally, they use the entire range of moods and emotions in their own productions.

When it comes down to it, the music of the duet has one thing in common: colossally enormous elements are expertly put against a shimmering backdrop of immensely intricate layers. They are all so tensely subtle that they resemble the first rains of a huge thunderstorm. Every break they create literally sounds like the quiet before the storm, and when it hits you, you feel the force of the wind in your face.

Their tracks are full of tension and drama, ranging from pounding electronica over slow organic sounds coming from both nature and acoustic instruments to deep dance pop ballads. In their productions, the two friends conjure up soundscapes that are extremely dense and at the same time infinitely open and spacious.

They experiment with strong contrasts of diametrically opposed components within this framework, such as repetition and improvisation, functionality and emotions, emptiness and overload, clarity and crackling.