Bio
Jake Landau is a multi-instrumentalist, composer, sound engineer, field recordist, and multi-disciplinary artist based in Berlin, Germany. He is co-founder of the label and publisher Habitat Sounds. Landau’s hybrid artistic practice is constantly evolving and taking new shape in mediums of photography, video, sound installation, and production with a strength in bridging creative vision, technical expertise, and practical project management to take complex multidisciplinary projects from idea to completion.
His recent work is focused on questions of family lineage, and uncovering hidden and previously unknown truths and connections through archival research of vital records with a forthcoming book of research and stories and solo piano album.
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 Pulitzer Prize-winning 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, UNESCO Sites Doñana National Park in Spain and Jasmund National Park on the Baltic Sea in Germany, and most recently in the Sea of Cortez in Baja California Sur, Mexico. Through his love of travel and being taken by the visually stunning aspects of these places as well as the sounds, he began documenting these trips with photography.
Landau has recorded and released over 10 Splice Sound Packs with Ibarra including Migration Sounds, Sounds of Drâa Valley Morocco, Bizung Power of the Drums 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, South Korea 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 NY.