Laura + Luzius Schuler: Mandà in Lunga

In the autumn and winter of 2023, Laura and Luzius Schuler travel to Val Poschiavo to listen to high alpine tales and, much like glacial ice burying stones beneath it, press them onto vinyl.

Mandà in Lunga is the name of the new album by Laura and Luzius Schuler, as well as the accompanying film by Yannick Mosimann. Recorded in the reformed church of Poschiavo, with Luzius on the church organ and Laura on violin and vocals, these two sessions are improvised confrontations with the surrounding environment, somewhere between acoustic ambient and experimental sound art.

It is music of crystalline beauty, equally natural spectacle and document of a most intimate musical interaction. Here, siblings Laura and Luzius are confronted with the rugged mountain world and a landscape in a state of flux. In the face of this scenery, voice and instruments become mist and shadow. They pulse like the rock that surrounds them. The organ is no longer a monolith, but flexible, malleable, capable of singing, while the bow plays the wind, the light, the water. This music resembles the brushstroke of the sun, which brings the stone to life, painting it through the clouds.  

These archaic sounds don't seem to fit in at all with the supposedly peaceful, ideal Alpine world.

Laura and Luzius Schuler improvise determined, tension-filled music and correct our romanticized image of the mountains to something magical and mystical. They set nature to music in a state of suspension, in a rhythmic weave, with physical presence and a fine sense of melody and texture. We now hear them with a pronounced urgency when we look up at the rocks. We ourselves in a state of suspension.