Tosca

No Hassle is Tosca's fifth studio album, and their most beautiful musical statement so far. A luxurious tapestry of analogue and digital sounds, submerged samples and live instruments, it evolves and expands into an hour-long ambient symphony. The title reflects not only the duo's laidback approach to making music but their whole philosophy of life.

'It's our personal reaction to everything,' says Richard Dorfmeister. 'To all things that are pressuring you from outside, or internally, from every angle. It's sort of the ideal position to achieve, and it's the same idea behind the music: to achieve an hour where you feel hassle free.'

No Hassle is all about contemplation and concentration, an introspective journey into inner space. It was conceived as a single seamless sea of sound, deeply layered with liquid rhythms and tidal melodies. Warm and enveloping, each leisurely track flows gently into the next, a musical ocean moving in slow motion. This is an album to plunge deeply into and get lost inside.

'We wanted to make the ultimate one hour of music where you don't feel like you have to skip to the next track,' explains Rupert Huber. 'This is what we've been working on all these years. An album to invest one hour of your attention and concentration, almost like an audio massage.'

In a bold break with Tosca tradition, No Hassle is an almost entirely instrumental album featuring no main vocal tracks. It does contain a few sampled voices among its fluid ambient soundscapes, but nothing that fits a conventional song structure. As the duo explain, this was a deliberate stripping down process. Less is more.

'This time we decided not to have any lead vocals,' Richard explains, 'but just to take some fragments of sounds that we liked. It's a very back-to-basics, instrumental approach. The more we listened to normal vocal recordings, the more we didn't like them. This reduced vocal idea seems to last longer for us.'