3rd album from THE DURA HOTEL

Dwellers, Denizens, & Travellers


"The Grand Hotel Abyss...a beautiful hotel, equipped with every comfort, on the edge of an abyss, of nothingness, of absurdity. And the daily contemplation of the abyss, between excellent meals or artistic entertainments, can only heighten the enjoyment of the subtle comforts offered."

-Georg Lukács


The recorded musical form introduced spatiality to sounds composition. No longer was "music" reducible to the sprawls of an idiot-savant's lined diary page, but the architectural being of sound's resonance. It's notable that the first recording retained nearly nothing of the performed song's words or notes, but did have an uncannily recognizable human voice.

So, too, introduced recording the hauntological metaphysic of music. The sound of music's performance has superseded that very performance, fixed it in a procession of the dead's sure capture. The ghosts of the future's radical alterity has haunted the recorded form, seeing as the spectre has no spatial stick.

Even as the invention of a world wide web promised an anarchic destruction of the globe's space, so too has that space informed the internet's restrictions, the so-called “virtual reality” replicating the limitations already inherent in physical experience. Where may the limits of anthropocentric cultures end in lieu of some outer boundary?

"Built within a sonic wormhole nestled in the foothills of the Swiss Alps of the mid 1300’s, the Dura Hotel has largely remained a mystery throughout its infinite existence as a retreat for musicians & composers. Since its opening, nearly every artist in the history of music has spent at least one haunted night wandering its cacophonous halls in search of inspiration and ideas. Most leave the way they arrive, frustrated, uninspired and empty handed. But there are those who come away enhanced by the experience, their minds permanently altered & expanded by it. Those who do not take for granted the gifts the Hotel has to give, but who graciously accept each moment, however discordant, in the spirit in which it was offered, as mana..."

The Dura Hotel's sound is built from the recordings compiled and reworked into new composition, often unrecognizable from their source material. In this sense, the original recording's architecture, modes of measure and rhythm has been broken and rearranged into a new durational experience, an intuitive durée separated from the logics of spatial recording into the new post-spatial digital wharf. Post-spatial is not to say post-human; the convergence of over 90 subjective viewpoints blurs the dominance of any one voice. Much as the Dada simultaneous poem revealed the essential human voice, and the combination of any two faces creates an aesthetically-superior synthesis, so too the Dura's rhizomatic composition reveals some essentially perceptual experience of sound perhaps of an ear, but at least that Lynchian severed ear with no dominant body to adhere.

The rooms of The Dura Hotel need no reservation. It is a liminal space wherein thought neither sleeps nor awakens, but flows along the uninhabitable bridges of experience. While the sound is not without influence and style, it nonetheless exceeds beyond towards the experience of the object-in-itself, finally beyond towards something other than the sein's anticipated death and exchange.

We hope you enjoy your stay.