Following the album Volumes released on the Bern-based label CRTTR in April 2025, Tobias Lanz has continued working with this original composition through two new interpretations. While the earlier recording sought to recreate and expand the pallete of the church organ through digital means, these new works shift attention back toward an acoustic interpretation. Both pieces were recorded in the Stadtkirche Burgdorf, where the large hall functions as an active collaborator. Sound expands and accumulates reverb of the room becoming a structural component rather than simply environmental.

The project belongs to a lineage of perceptual minimalism and phenomenological sound practice associated with figures such as La Monte Young, Pauline Oliveros, James Tenney and Eliane Radigue, yet it approaches these traditions not through quotation but through a related exploration of the materiality of attention. Volumes sets up conditions in which small harmonic relations, shifts in resonance and the subtle instability of phase interactions rise to the level of the principal event.

Minimal in gesture, maximal in consequence.

Here, the concept of volume becomes crucial. Volume is approached in its spatial sense, as the three–dimensional extension of sound as it occupies and shapes a given environment. Sound is treated as a body with measurable form, a shifting mass of air that expands through the room, presses against surfaces and folds back into itself through reflection and resonance. In this way, volume becomes an ontology of spatial presence and transformation. Each sound in Volumes emerges as a temporary individual produced through interference with other tones, with the specific acoustics of the church and with the perceptual field of the listener. Volume becomes a relational field in which sounds coinhabit space and continuously remake one another.

Throughout the work, Tobias focuses on drones, beat frequencies and spatial interactions. By reducing musical gesture to long, sustained tones and minimal variation, attention is redirected to the micro events occurring between sounds. Harmonics fold into one another, creating a slowly shifting resonance that fills the room like a sculptural material. These interactions do not sit atop the composition but are the composition. Rhythm arises not from pulse but from the oscillatory beating of close intervals, a phenomenon that unfolds at the edge of perception and reorganizes the listener’s sense of time.

As the composition develops, layers accumulate and dissolve, temporality becomes suspended. The piece invites the listener into a state in which the distinction between event and ambience becomes unstable.

Volumes for Organ, created in Summer 2025 and premiered as part of the annual organ concert series at Stadtkirche Burgdorf, employs the church’s two organs alongside understated electronics. The main organ is electronically controlled and tuned to twelve tone equal temperament, offering a wide palette of registers and modulation effects. The smaller swallow’s nest organ on the opposite wall, tuned to Werkmeister III and controlled mechanically, allows for seamlessly pulled registers and under-blown pipes. This combination creates a dynamic field of tuning systems and actuation methods that exposes the inner tensions of the organ as both historical instrument and technological apparatus. Beat frequencies become points where these systems meet and resist one another.

Volumes for Guitar adopts an entirely different but conceptually parallel approach. Performed by Lisa Mark, Dimitri Grünig, Martin Oesch and Tobias Lanz on three electric guitars and an electric bass played with e-Bows, the piece transforms the ensemble into a collective oscillator. Microtonal bending creates pronounced beat frequencies which, amplified by the reverberant room, generate complex layers of perceived rhythm. Here too, minimal gesture is used to reveal a dense interior landscape. The guitar quartet rearticulates the logic of the original composition in a more fragile, almost provisional form. The monumental solidity of the organ is replaced by an ensemble that produces sound through tension, proximity and mutual adjustment.

Across both works, Volumes proposes that sound is not an object but a relation. It is something that comes into being through spatial encounter, through sustained attention and through the subtle negotiations between instruments, architecture and listening bodies. These recordings document not only compositions but acoustic situations in which these negotiations can unfold.

Written, recorded and mixed by Tobias Lanz Mastered by Jacob Calland

Volumes for Organ

Tobias Lanz - Organ, Physical Modelling Simon Lanz - Registration

Volumes for Guitar

Lisa Mark - Bass Martin Oesch - Guitar Dimitri Grüenig- Guitar Tobias Lanz - Guitar

Thanks: Lisa, Dimi, Tinu, Simon, Nina, Jacob, Romaine, Julia, Mom, Dad

Supported by Stadt Burgdorf, (Kultur Stadt Bern, Swisslos – Kultur Kanton Bern, Burgergemeinde Bern), Migros Kulturprozent