Soar - Soar

Soar
Soar
Efficient Space
Switzerland/Australia, 2025
LP

Soar was the home recording project of the Swiss autodidact Christian Aebi, who quietly amassed a humble discography of five records in hand-pasted sleeves alongside a sprawling archive of 25 reputed cassettes. None of this music traveled far from home within his lifetime. This compilation scrapbooks some highlights for a wider audience: humble bedroom pop, atmospheric psych jams, and grinning, lonesome hippy folk. 

It’s probably just a free association, but I can’t help but think of that other solitary Swiss, Robert Walser, an agreeable wanderer who was a major influence on Kafka and whom Susan Sontag described as “a Paul Klee in prose” and “a good-humored, sweet Beckett.” Famously, Walser invented a shorthand of his own in later years and jotted down a number of stories in a microscript that was thought to be either nonsense or indecipherable until it was finally deciphered, adding substantial works to his bibliography long after the fact.

There’s something similar at play here: a private language, a humility, a prolificness that seems to be less about an endless search for validation than a simple tinkerer’s curiosity. And then finally, belatedly, a discovery, a recognition, a delayed reception—still modest, in the scheme of things, but warranted, to scale.