about the record

Soar is the alias of Christian Aebi, a DIY taper and one-man orchestra from Langenthal. Working mainly with a broken Tascam four-track recorder, he recorded music in attics, churches, junkyards, and at the kitchen table.

Between 1994 and the early 2000s, he made five albums and an unverified run of 25 cassettes, mostly released through the Zurich label Corazoo. The records arrived in hand-pasted sleeves, rough-cut reproductions of his teddy bear-fixated artwork that carried the same imperfect immediacy as the music. He also played a handful of gigs. With Rudi Steiner, these performances in galleries, clubs, and halls developed into live sound-image happenings, part installation, part film and part flea-market instrument theatre.

When he died in 2021, his music remained a village secret, circulating among friends and local listeners. A portrait has since been assembled by Ivan Liechti from available material, bringing together audio formats, paintings, illustrations, photographs, and notebooks in collaboration with his family, former label, and peers. What emerges is a glimpse of Soar’s intimate cosmos, brushing against Füxa, Spectrum, Dump, Stereolab, and King Crimson, but orbiting a dimension entirely his own.