Howling’s ‘Sacred Ground’ Is One of the Year’s Most Gorgeous Albums
Cuming and Widermann
There’s a fine line between downtempo electronic music and Muzak. Thankfully, Howling never comes close to crossing it.
The duo—consisting of Australian singer-songwriter Ry Cuming, aka Ry X, and German techno producer Frank Wiedemann—do, in fact, make beat music chill enough to relax your muscles and slow your heart rate. They never, however, succumb to ambient clichés. Instead, their debut album—Sacred Ground, which was released on Monkeytown Records in May—features fully formed compositions in which subdued tempos and textures cross with dynamic shifts and complex rhythms.
It’s intricate music reminiscent of Cocteau Twins or The King of Limbs-era Radiohead, but these guys aren’t trying to show off. Speaking by phone from his home in Berlin, Wiedemann says they’re just following their instincts.
“It’s just a very honest album,” he says. “We produced the album, like we say in Germany, ‘from the stomach.’ There’s no marketing plan behind it. We just did what we wanted to do.”
At first glance, Wiedemann and Cuming seem like an unlikely pairing; but in fact, they have a lot in common. When he’s not making solo music or playing with Howling, Ry X plays in the Acid, an L.A.-based trio specializing in smoldering electronic sounds. Wiedemann co-runs the label Innervisions and plays in Âme, a techno due that has transcended dance music’s sometimes indecipherable genre barriers with anthems like 2006’s minimalist “Rej.”
What Wiedemann and Cuming share most deeply is a penchant for moody atmospheres and finely honed rhythmic/melodic interplays. Just consider “Short Line” from Sacred Ground. It opens with a synth line that sounds like it’s flickering across a pool of water. Then Cuming comes in like a smokier Thom Yorke, and the song builds in intensity with a pulsing bassline and brisk drums before culminating in a UFO-like synth levitation.
The album took three years to make. Wiedemann and Cuming first paired up on Skype and forged what would become a viral hit with “Howling,” a hypnotic piece of electro-folk guided by gentle guitar plucks expanded to enormous mass. In the time since, the duo has recorded in “magical” places across the U.S. and Europe, including the meditation room of Cuming’s house, nestled in the Santa Monica Mountains of L.A. County. Another was a high-end studio in Bath, England, surrounded by the largest manicured lawn Wiedemann’s ever seen.
“It sounds silly, but you have a perspective, you know? You have a view. That’s what makes you be of the mind to create something you wouldn’t create in another place,” Wiedemann says. “One thing I found out, for myself at least, is that it’s not so much about the high-end studio you’re recording in. It’s more about the location where you’re actually at—that you love to be there, and [you can] just be free to create.”
Of course, taking three years to make an album is a rarity in the club world, where the average track is usually produced, distributed, danced to and forgotten at a much faster rate. But Wiedemann doesn’t feel the need to cater too much to the heart-palpitating rhythms of Berlin nightlife. He misses out on most of the city’s big parties because he’s usually touring, and he also has a 10-month-old son to take care of.
That’s not to say Howling is opposed to dance music. On tour, Wiedemann and Cuming like to change up their set based on the crowd in front of them. In more intimate venues, they’ll stretch out into a 10-minute jam of their trance-inducing ballad “Lullaby”; on bigger festival stages, they’ll tuck that one away and throw down heavier beats.
“It’s always nice to play with a present audience, but you can’t expect that from a club audience, because they’re used to just dancing to the music,” Wiedemann says. “We love it when they’re with us and when they follow us quietly, but we also love it when everybody’s just dancing.”
Plenty of producers over the years have made chill music with no longevity; ambience and atmosphere is so common that the genre comes with its own romantic buzzwords: “billowing” synths, “dreamy” echo effects, “cosmic” drone tones and sustained piano chords. The truth is that relying on all of this sonic soma without shoring it up with solid compositional structure leads to trite formulas and boring listens. But if you can do what Howling does and make those songs fit different frameworks and contexts? That is a good sign.
So it makes sense why Weidemann and Cuming took so much time to make Sacred Ground. They wanted to make something that could still soothe the soul years from now, long after today’s trends have passed.
“I’m actually happy that, for the album, we both were relaxed enough to just let it happen slowly,” Wiedemann says. “That’s good, you know?”
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