If you look at the sea long enough, you see yourself more clearly than in a mirror
Is it often thought that a band with no vocals or lyrics relies on a harder mission? They miss, I guess, a cornerstone of a general songs embodiment. In the same way that mammals rely on a whole set of fur to fulfil their allocated duties as animals because they appear to be naked without it. However, there’s clarity in the mere simplicity of stripping away that ego pretence, were there to be any, hypothetically speaking. Take away the lyrics, the drums, and the bass of a song and enjoy the purity of two guitar melodies, the distinctive ability to dance in the form of sound, to take over an adjacent meaning. The distinction between sound and emotion becomes blurred.
HOEHN, the two brothers from Switzerland, embroider their childhood into profound pieces, which can only be interpreted via the intercepting pull and release of their guitar playing and intuitive compositions. Wistful in presence, they reform their summers in France as young boys into listenable textures. Upon a first listen, the rawness is what first captures you, followed by harmonies, whilst paying tribute to their sandy influences from the midst of their beach holidays. The calmness they clearly felt in those trips has allocated itself within the lines of their songs.
It was during those summers that they discovered a leisure in playing guitar together. Silvan sat on the terrace and played his first simple chords and Samuel, who used only to play the trumpet, took a second guitar and played simple melodies on the highest E-string. This marked the very beginning of their collaborative creativity which brought any signs of bleakness to a standstill. They’ve been writing together ever since until, in 2023, they decided to officialise this musical project in honour of their late great-grandfather Alfred Hoehn, a well-known pianist who at his time toured Europe and Russia with various orchestras and conductors.
It then happened last May, when their dexterity was finalised into a debut album, “Mistral”. A seventeen-track piece which morphs gently into and out of each song like a benign snake reduced to rephrasing musically their extensive connections with what they have come to consider magical places in Portugal and France. What they transmit is intensifying. Their gentle jazz-like plucking helps settle as a mild burn in my chest, I guess it’s music that simply makes me feel something. The wordless intervention between percussive layers upon melodic and intuitive layers border on something devastating, but not in a negative tone, as if the classical heaviness in their training has given the songs an opportunity to transcribe the brothers’ true sensations.
Whether it’s the Mediterranean or the Atlantic, it is at the open sea where they welcome inspiration, where they see their soul mirrored from the water. “If you look at the sea long enough, you see yourself more clearly than when you look in a real mirror”. The connection to the ocean proves important to their creative process. “We try to write a lot of our pieces with this background and the grand scale of the sea. We transform the emotions we deal with as brothers and our relationship into music.”
The fifth song of the album is named the same; “Mistral”. The track lends you an instance of nostalgia before completely giving in to its yearning guitar licks; the homesickness of its tone gives away the brothers' longing to be back on the coast of France. This track was made out of a moment of synchronisation of their feelings, where the mutual desire to feel the mistral wind once again bridged a love song for their childhood, where the beginning of their collaborative learning took place. “It’s difficult to say how the nuances in our emotions differ. But what we have in common is the image of the coast in the south of France, where the mistral “wind” blows and sets nature, bamboo bushes, grasses, palms and trees in motion.”
They work based on a mutual desire to help and inspire each other throughout this procedure. Their brotherly instincts drift their musical intuition into synchronisation, having not bothered with the importance of egos, they move slowly in the look out of facing each solution with care. Samuel approaches his role in that of a melodic influence from playing the trumpet, and Silvan experiments with timbres and different guitar tunings, capturing harmonic and percussive layers. Two musical paths of a classical and a jazz education have, unsurprisingly, led to a complementary combination of their musical tones.
“Ericeira” is the second song of the lot—a song based on the Portuguese coastal town where they spent most of their time composing together. The love for the place and Silvan’s intense relationship with the country had formed a deep crevice in the band’s writing sessions. It brushes, once again, a subtle nostalgia into one’s skin. The lightness in which they detour each note, each rhythm, into the next brings the song to a floating vibrance. It’s the next song of the album “Sand” which perfectly captures the dissolving of “Ericeira”. It gently reassures the listener to stop for a minute and understand the subtle message. This track holds the two brothers accountable for reaching for new possibilities within their songwriting. Silvan played the melody here, and Samuel played a few chords—the soft bounciness of the track emerging from this astray of roles and Silvan’s slightly off-tune guitar.
By weaving memories into sound and emotions into visions, the two have crafted a masterwork of love in their album. They chose to prioritise sentiment over perfection, an element clearly noticeable in their recordings. Flickers of tiny mistakes within the sound create a certain liveliness, breathing authenticity into their compositions. As they continue to discover more recordings of their great-grandfather's work, their purpose expands, fuelled by the ongoing discovery of their inherited talent.
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