Buy Link: orcd.co/thehyve
Stimming releases second single, The Hyve, from his upcoming album LUDWIG
Stimming’s 6th studio album, Ludwig is without a doubt breaking new grounds for the producer. The album looks beyond the clubs where Stimming built a solid, decades-long career as part of the Diynamic family taking flight on a personal, self-released journey. Perhaps it’s only a coincidence that the album’s cover and the names of three tracks remit to flying creatures, or that Stimming has a model A350 in his studio, but throughout the album there’s definitely a feeling of airiness, a new breathing space acquired by forgoing the need to make the music danceable. This isn’t usual Stimming, where he’s applying his famed technical know-how to sound. In Ludwig the process is somewhat inverse; there’s a sense that Stimming is learning, or re-learning, a thing or two from sound, he’s ‘looking for the essence,’ making the album original – of the origins – in a literal sense.
“If you look at my last album and you remove the groove, what’s left? This is what’s interesting to me now. I’m not interested in functionality anymore – at least not for now.”
The Hyve is Ludwig’s second single, a tune that’s so elegantly crafted that it can afford to unfold slowly while remaining riveting from start to finish. The sound of bees at the beginning of the track signal latent and lurking threats but with every refined element Stimming adds the feeling of menace gets converted to apprehension, which in turn quietly shifts to reverence and awe. The track also sees Stimming take his passion for field recordings to new heights, he went as far as placing a recorder inside one of his father’s beehives leaving it there for a whole day so he could hear the inner workings of the complex structure. The rhythmic clank that underpins the whole tune, like heavy machinery on a factory floor, is just one of the mysterious sounds captured, it’s organic yet extremely mechanical-sounding. Stimming’s own explorations with subtle drum machines and a goosebump-inducing synth-melody are both futuristic and retro, and, as is usual for the producer, incredibly moving without ever going overboard.
Release Date: April 23rd, 2021.