Jake Landau

Jake Landau is a multi-instrumentalist, composer, sound engineer and field recordist based in Berlin. Landau’s hybrid artistic practice is constantly evolving and taking new shape. With music as a backbone, he started as a drummer from a young age, soon picking up the guitar, and then the piano. His love and study of music and instruments expanded further to natural sounds and recording during his college years. This led to studying the musicality of all sounds and applying studio recording techniques and practices on the field in remote and rugged natural locations through extensive work with composer/percussionist Susie Ibarra. Together, Landau and Ibarra have recorded both music and natural sounds of water, glaciers, birdsongs, oceans, trees, and more on the field in the Sikkim and Indian Himalayas, South Sahara Desert in Morocco, Doñana National Park in Spain, Jasmund National Park on the Baltic Sea in Germany, and more. Landau has recorded and released over 10 Splice Sound Packs with Ibarra including “Migration Sounds”, “Sounds of Drâa Valley Morocco”, “Bizung Power of the Drum Tamale Ghana”, “Lithophones”, “Heart and Breath: Ambient Hypnotic” with Ibarra and Richard Reed Parry of Arcade Fire, and “Memories: Melancholy Pop”. He has engineered and spatialized compositions for surround sound installations for Ibarra’s “Sound and Science Climate Change” work in collaboration with geomorphologist Dr Michele Koppes, “Water Rhythms: Listening to Climate Change”, which has been installed and shown at the San Francisco Exploratorium, Fridman Gallery in Beacon, NY, TED Climate Countdown and Arko Art Center in Seoul, among others. Landau can be heard on his 2021 and 2022 releases “Dreambook 1: Breaking the Silence” and “Dreambook 2: Breathing and Dreaming”, as well as Ibarra’s 2017 release “Perception” and 2021 release “Walking on Water”. He has performed with Ibarra at the 2016 Rio Olympics, as part of her Dreamtime Ensemble, and at Zamane Festival in M’Hamid El Ghizlane, South Sahara, Drâa Valley, Morocco with Fragility Etudes Ensemble comprised of 30 musicians from Morocco, Ghana, Mali and New York. Landau and Ibarra co-founded the label and publisher Habitat Sounds.