No Hassle
Slow down. Relax. Take a deep breath. Steal back an hour from your busy life. This really is worth your full attention. Tosca, the Viennese masters of deluxe soundscapes and sensual rhythms, are back with their most magical and mesmerising album yet. It’s called No Hassle.
Multi-instrumentalists Richard Dorfmeister and Rupert Huber have been friends since their Vienna schooldays, when they founded their first experimental band, Dehli 9. Richard later became half of the globally acclaimed DJ-producer duo Kruder and Dorfmeister, while Rupert composed piano music, soundart installations and acoustic networks. But the duo rediscovered their musical chemistry again with their Tosca debut, the 1994 12” Chocolate Elvis.
A string of highly praised albums and remix collections followed.No Hassle is Tosca’s fifth studio album, and their most beautiful musical statement so far. A luxurious tapestry of analogue and digital sounds, submerged samples and live instruments, it evolves and expands into an hour-long ambient symphony. The title reflects not only the duo’s laidback approach to making music but their whole philosophy of life.
“It’s our personal reaction to everything,” says Richard.
To all things that are pressuring you from outside, or internally, from every angle. It’s sort of the ideal position to achieve, and it’s the same idea behind the music: to achieve an hour where you feel hassle free.
On this album, Richard and Rupert have taken their music to more intense, meditative depths than ever before. From the dreamlike ambi-rock of Elektra Bregenz to the lush avant-jazz tapestry of No Hassle itself, this is an engrossing musical journey which calms the mind and floods the senses. The album’s stark musical landscape may seem alien and exotic in places, but there are a few familiar signposts along the way.
The parched guitar twangs on the melting sci-fi symphony My First and the heat-haze desert blues Joe Si Ha contain ghostly traces of broken blues guitars. The perfumed magic carpet ride Elitsa and the spooky cinematic ripples of Rosa recall psychodelic music at it´s most cosmic. And the beatific female voice drifting through Birthday has all the hypnotic power of the sun rising over the ocean.
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