hove - journey to arendal

Johanna Norris

The only information that the record label Light of Other Days exposes about itself on its website is the words “WE ARE A ZURICH BASED RECORD LABEL”. With some further digging into the online archives, Light of Other Days turns out to have been brought into existence by Swiss DJs Marc Hofweber and Georg Munz in late 2015, having so far released house-heavy cassette and vinyl recordings by Ethimm, and Marc Hofweber under the pseudonym HOVE. The launch party for HOVE’s first release was back in November 2015 at Zukunft in Zurich and since then his acclaim has been seeping into the local music scene. Last week, HOVE reached a critical point when his 12-inch Journey to Arendal was part of the ‘Week’s Best Vinyl’ selection of the esteemed online music magazine Fact. For his first ever solo-project, HOVE has proved that he’s capable of creating some pretty powerful stuff.

Hofweber’s well-known defiance of genre in his DJ sets is certainly evident in Journey to Arendal. The dreamy opening track Hillside uses binaural recording in all the right ways, with soothing birdsong and delayed guitar chords which amount to something more when bouncy synths enter the mix. Think of Beach House but with synths instead of drums. The twitchy title track fools you into thinking you’ve stumbled into an 80s club in Chicago. 

The bassline is as good as Mylo vs. Miami Sound Machine’s Dr Pressure with a funky rhythm not quite strong enough to dance to. On the B-side, Ride Out begins to bring in the bass drum and Balearic dance beats. There’s a Canadian house vibe about this one. Unfortunately, I couldn’t help thinking of Kygo when I listened to this track – very danceable for the first few minutes, but overall quite generic. HOVE’s first 12-inch is craftily assembled and it looks like Light of Other Days are finally gaining their reputation after making it into Fact magazine last week. The cassette by HOVE shows off more of Hofweber’s creative talents, experimenting with an eclectic range of sounds and musical concepts, and it's anyone's guess which summer festival will be the first to have HOVE on their line-up…