Assume Intimacy enthralls the listener in a bath of uncharted tones, texture and atmosphere.
The result is an album that offers a clear representation of the balance between the uncanny and the anomalous, weighted against the familiarity that provides comfort and solace. This duality sits at the center of the record’s storytelling from beginning to end and shapes its ultimate declaration.
Julia Häller, performing under the pseudonym Chewlie, uses an unconventional musical palette to construct a rhythm-forward sonic landscape that feels as appropriate in a contemporary art gallery as it does on a late-night dance floor.
Häller is a producer, visual artist and DJ based in Bern, Switzerland.
Released last month through CRTTR, a Bern-based collective devoted to collaboration across experimental music, film and graphic arts, Assume Intimacy marks the artist’s first standalone solo release through the collective under the Chewlie moniker. Häller has previously released a handful of collaborative projects through CRTTR.
With closed eyes, Assume Intimacy becomes an expedition into the farthest reaches of cyberspace and the deepest regions of the self.
That sense of omnipresence is achieved through a language of unfamiliar timbres that draw equally from synthetic electronic sources and organic resonances. The ambiguity of those sonic origins establishes a duality that evokes both vast celestial scales and the smallest molecular nuances of existence.
Steeped in this grand unfamiliarity — and in the implications of its title — the record carries a sensuality and sense of communion frequently associated with electronic dance music, resonating throughout the recording.
The album opens with “Bewinged,” a sweeping, heavenly soundscape that gives way to a modest-tempo beat, accented by the first of many unplaceable tones that permeate the project.
“Tree Me Blind” increases the tempo, its melody carrying qualities that suggest both saxophone and electric guitar. At moments, the percussion drops away entirely, leaving that intangible voice as the sole point of focus.
The effect embodies one of the album’s central impressions: an alien familiarity.
Throughout the record, elements carry deeply recognizable weight but arrive subtly altered, rendered distant from their original points of reference. Listening to Assume Intimacy can feel like walking through a space once known intimately, revisited years later and found nearly unrecognizable — except here, the gap between visits may feel as short as a single day.
The phenomenon resembles derealization, sometimes called the “stranger effect,” a relatively common psychological experience that is typically brief and considered harmless.
That condition reflects the listening experience, further emphasizing Assume Intimacy as an eccentric and distinctive work.
“Sweetness Upon You” pushes further into the album’s more assured themes, though an abyssal, disembodied voice featured prominently throughout the track reinforces the sense of derealization. The mind wanders: Is this a lover, or a close friend, attempting to communicate through an impenetrable barrier?
“Organ Interlude” further dissociates the listener from recognizable reality, its electric organ fragmenting into, at times, nearly unidentifiable waveforms.
The album continues with “Power of Blooming,” which marks a tentative return to shared reality. The track is built around a modern, unpredictable beat beneath a sweeping synthetic arpeggio, moving slowly across the composition like stars drifting over a terrestrial landscape.
That trajectory continues with “Heavy Hearted,” grounded by a slow, steady beat punctuated by digital sputters. A collaboration with the French producer s8jfou, it is the most club-friendly track on the album — a mindful, restrained dance piece.
The song allows space for two dancers to entwine in the depths of the night. While it feels as though the album lingers longer in this moment, the track’s four-and-a-half-minute duration is consistent with the rest of the record.
Following that moment of movement and stability, “Break Me Tender” begins, carrying the listener through an unpredictable collage of staccato tones that evoke rainfall – or more profoundly a symphony of cracks, leading ever closer toward a collapse.
As suggested by the song’s title, the album now begins to fracture. What once felt unified appears to be systematically dismantled, as if the emotional coherence of the preceding work is breaking apart.
Then comes the realization at the heart of the album’s intimacy: this unfamiliarity is not rooted in place, but in a person — someone once tangible and within reach, now seemingly at an infinite distance.
Assume Intimacy reveals itself as a breakup record. Not simply a reflection on loss, but a carefully composed and executed representation of the emotional reality of a relationship’s end.
Platonic or romantic, the distinction hardly matters. What emerges is a poetic depiction of the moment one realizes that what once was can never exist in quite the same way again.
And that realization carries its own quiet beauty.
The album concludes with “Slowly Cleared,” a minor-key, melancholic piece that gently echoes the synthetic fractures that have persisted throughout the work. Those sonic cracks serve as reminders of the fragility underlying shared human experience.
It is an acknowledgment that, regardless of who we are, we can gather the pieces, move forward — and, sometimes, begin again.
And that, too, is beautiful.
