The title says it all: this album doesn’t defy gravity - it embraces it. But not in the clumsy way most mortals do, tripping over their own weight; Raphael Loher hugs gravity like an old friend who happens to bend time. "Hug of Gravity" is not a collection of pieces so much as a slow-motion implosion of what we think “a piano album” should be - an act of surrender to the pull of matter, memory, and magnetized tape.

Loher, the Swiss pianist and composer already known for his work with KALI Trio and Baumschule, seems to have wandered far from the polite landscapes of minimalism into something more unsettled and fertile. Built from reworked recordings of his debut Keemuun, these four long pieces (each the length of a small geological age) operate on what you might call extended time perception - not ambient in the background sense, but ambient in the sense of air itself being thickened. You don’t listen to "Hug of Gravity"; you inhabit it until your sense of minutes starts to fray.

The process, as Loher describes it, sounds almost absurdly meticulous: a three-month residency in the Swiss mountains, where he cut, spliced, detuned, slowed, re-recorded, and then spliced again. You can feel that obsessive loop in the sound - every tone like a reflection trapped between peaks, slowly losing its identity. The prepared piano (sometimes dampened by modelling clay, sometimes warped by tape varispeed) becomes less an instrument and more a set of tectonic plates sliding past each other. Notes bend into interference patterns; harmonics flutter like fragile insects caught in slow wind.

There’s something paradoxically playful in this austerity. Loher doesn’t sound like he’s meditating on silence - he’s toying with gravity’s rhythm, teasing it, as if time could be kneaded like dough. At points, the music recalls the decaying architectures of William Basinski, or the patient emotional ambiguity of Linda Catlin Smith, but Loher’s touch is more tactile, more physical. His manipulation of analog tape and clay feels almost ritualistic, a performance of touch in an age of detached digitalism.

The four “Hug of Gravity” movements form a continuum, yet each shifts subtly - a new gravitational field, a new kind of drift. The second part feels like it’s breathing in and out of itself, small crescendos swelling like light through fog. By the third, the listener has lost all sense of tempo; by the fourth, you’re not sure whether the sound is slowing down or your perception is. It’s an exercise in calm ecstasy, yes, but also an experiment in disorientation - a kind of audio vertigo disguised as serenity.

Even the artwork mirrors this paradox: Loher’s line drawings, layered in overlapping transparencies, echo the album’s self-generating geometry - never identical, always shifting.

At its core, "Hug of Gravity" is a study in transformation - of sound, of place, of the artist himself. It’s an album that doesn’t aim to impress or soothe, but to stretch perception until it trembles. Listening to it feels like watching a glacier melt in real time: patient, massive, quietly devastating.

Raphael Loher doesn’t fight gravity. He gives it a voice - and then slows it down until it starts to sing back.