Athem, the latest full-length solo effort from Hub Hildenbrand is a body of work that brings the artist’s singing voice into the foreground, albeit in an unconventional way. To date, his singing was mostly textural in nature and/or used to add color and new timbres to arrangements. For the purposes of this record, Hildenbrand decided to create an actual language, one that would allow him to encode meaning, but without it being readily accessible to the listener. The idea was to design a vehicle that would enable him to “speak” on very intimate topics, but from a safe-space created by the opacity of the language. He was adamant about wanting the listeners to engage with these songs at purely emotional and aesthetic levels, without imposing any fixed narratives on them or tainting their individual readings with his own ideas. The result is a very personal work, brimming with emotion, but open to interpretation.