Chambers is the first Aukai album where Sieber played all of the instruments himself. He drew inspiration from the fine-tuned acoustical properties of the room where the album was recorded: Saal 3 within Berlin’s historic Funkhaus studio complex. The Funkhaus had been in Sieber’s world since childhood. Built in the 1950s by audio experts of the newly-founded German Democratic Republic (GDR), it was the largest broadcasting station of East Germany. As a teenager in the Eighties, Sieber listened to DT64, the youth-oriented radio station that originated within the Funkhaus.

Years later, Funkhaus studio Saal 3, designed for recording chamber ensembles, was taken over and upgraded by pianist Nils Frahm. Drawn to the newly revived creative space, Sieber arrived at the Funkhaus on a hot, August day, armed with two of his signature instruments: a classical octave guitar and a baritone charango ( also called ronroco ), an Andean plucked string instrument. Sieber vividly remembers the moment:

“When I entered the Funkhaus, walking through the hallways to find Saal 3, it was like going through a time portal, back to far-off memories. The smells, the vibe reminded me very much of my childhood. Nothing seemed to have changed. These hallways had been preserved just as they had been in GDR times. Saal 3 invited me into its beautiful, spacious silence like a blank page.”

Working with engineer Antonio Pulli, Sieber laid down some guitar and charango sketches, weaving the gossamer webs of plucked string timbres that are at the heart of Aukai’s music. Accustomed to recording on his own travel equipment, converting houses, cottages and chalets into home recording studio across the Americas and Europe, Sieber found a new creative experience in the pristine acoustic environs of Saal 3:

“It felt contained, like being in an underground cave, protected from an outside world, with a stillness waiting to respond to the quietest, most tender tones of my charango and guitar, yet equally waiting to respond to the crushing sound waves of the studio’s reed organ.”

The latter is one of Saal 3’s many instruments, which Sieber began to explore on his third trip to Saal 3 on a rainy March day. By this point, he’d reviewed the recordings he’d made on the first two sessions at the studio and realized he was onto something new and exciting. Not really a keyboard player, he improvised and explored intuitively parts while recording on the studio’s reed organ, piano, celeste and synths, and further also overdubbing a range of new layers on his baritone guitar.

“This time, every sound the listener would hear had to be created by me,” he says. The gorgeously interwoven result has the subtlety and sepia-toned splendor of previous Aukai recordings, but in a whole new mode.

One signature sound on Chambers that was not recorded at Saal 3 was
generated by an instrument called bell plates, which Sieber discovered at Tone of Life instruments head quarters in Vilnius, Lithuania. Roaming the surrounding woods, Sieber brought together natural ambiences and the resonant copper tones of the bell plates. “When struck with the fingertips” Sieber expounds, “they have a subtle, magical ring.”

In keeping with the project’s minimalist constrained aesthetic, Sieber decided to mix the album in just one and a half days, working with Antonia Pulli at Saal 3 and without having any revisions after.
The result, Chambers, is an outstanding work within the deep catalog of Aukai recordings. It takes us closer than ever to the sources of Markus Sieber’s multi-hued musical world, revealing untold wonders of sound and spirit.