Some records sound from their first seconds like beautifully made electronic albums. Others suggest immediately that something more is about to happen. Trialog by the Viennese duo HVOB belongs firmly to the second category. Within minutes, rhythm, production and club utility reveal themselves as only part of the story. The music builds its own world and invites the listener inside, a world that is slow, concentrated and unexpectedly emotional.
Anna Müller and Paul Wallner have worked together since the early 2010s. Their sound emerged from Vienna's electronic scene but resists one drawer, sitting between melodic techno and deep house with Müller's whispered vocal behaving as another instrument rather than a conventional lead. From the start, HVOB performed live. They do not simply play prepared sets but make the music in the room with a drummer and manual control over each element. That detail explains the organic breath absent from much electronic production.
Their 2013 debut drew strong reviews and attention. Trialog, released by Stil vor Talent in April 2015, was a true step forward, and not only musically.
Three voices, one project
A trialogue is a conversation between three parties. HVOB invited Austrian visual artist Clemens Wolf and the VJ collective Lichterloh to ask a shared question. What if one album were simultaneously music, an art installation and a visual experience? This was not marketing or a video attached after the fact, but a project planned from the beginning as three equal voices.
Ten physical processes form its axis: mixing, melting, oxidising, imploding, burning and others. Each becomes the theme of one track, one work by Wolf and one set of visuals by Lichterloh. Sound, image and material installation describe the same process in distinct ways. Listening to Trialog therefore means listening to something never intended as only an album.
Window, for example, centres on mixing. Recorded sounds of stirring enter the introduction, the words address the same act and the video shows colours blending. Three narratives, one subject. This is not conceptualism for its own sake but a simple idea carried through with discipline.
Patience in electronic form
Musically, Trialog might sit at a crossing between Radiohead's Kid A period and Purity Ring, set more deeply inside club electronics. Opening track Azrael spends several minutes with essentially one sound and silence before introducing a second element. It teaches a patience rarely requested now.
The tracks construct a gentle dramatic curve, from an introverted beginning through intensification in the centre towards a melancholic ending that seems slowly to brighten.
Crucially, the album works in different settings: dance floor, car, headphones at two in the morning. Early English-language writing about it used words equivalent to timelessness and placelessness. The music is hostage to no single situation.
Beyond the studio
The project lived on tour across Europe, North and Central America, Africa and Asia. Each performance was audiovisual, with Lichterloh and Wolf part of the show rather than background. The audience heard the tracks while watching their visual examination unfold in real time.
HVOB remains relatively little known in Poland. Trialog is an ideal entry point and an argument for treating electronic music as a complete art form rather than sound for dancing. Somebody had something to say and said it in three voices at once.
For me, this is one of the most important albums, full stop. I have returned for years, and every time it sounds a little different, as though growing with its listener. Many electronic records are excellent. Very few have this much emotional space, concentration and elegance in their handling of tension.
The music neither shouts nor tries to impress. It asks you to stop and listen more closely. In an electronic world so often built for the velocity of one dance floor moment, Trialog achieves something far rarer: intimacy, concept and timelessness at once.
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