"More than twenty years of friendship haunt "Vrhaltnis", 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 Zurich. 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 Zurich and in Thailand- into the two extended pieces that form this album. "Iischtellig" and "Tuufi" 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 "Vrhaltnis" possesses a particular distant quality - the creators' specific gravity and distinct compositional traits concealed behind accumulating densities. Musique concrete 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?"-Krim Kram