DeWalta

Operating from Berlin, DeWalta fuses house and techno into a trance-like minimal aesthetic, with albums appearing on Haunt, Amphia, and his personal imprint Meander, among them the 2019 set Lyra.

David Koch came into the world in 1985 inside the scenic southern German town of Heidelberg, raised in a musically oriented home where he began classical French horn lessons at age six. Growing weary of written scores, he turned toward improvisation and, after encountering jazz through his late grandfather Walter’s record collection, picked up the tenor saxophone at 13. He pursued jazz studies first in Mannheim and later at Berlin’s Hanns Eisler Music Academy, having relocated to the capital at 15. Exposure to electronic sounds began via German hip-hop in the 1990s and continued through the city’s expanding club circuit; after completing his studies he explored production and launched the DeWalta project as a tribute to his grandfather. His earliest outing arrived in 2007 with the joint “Nebelhorn” EP alongside Aquatic on Kalk Pets. Shortly thereafter he founded Meander, whose debut offering was the solo DeWalta single “Eftive”/“Tesla,” a rubbery tech-house cut. Additional singles soon surfaced on Vakant, Salon, and Mike Shannon’s Cynosure imprint. Koch and Shannon developed a close partnership, forming the duo DeWalta & Shannon—in which Koch contributed saxophone—and issued several singles and EPs over the ensuing years. Shannon’s Haunt label released DeWalta’s debut album, the jazz-tinged Wander, in 2012. The follow-up LP, 2014’s Illumination—originally issued as two separate 12"s—marked Meander’s first full-length release; by then the label had expanded to include other artists such as Romanian Cristi Cons. DeWalta’s hypnotic Romanian-style minimal tech-house approach prompted the 2017 release of his third album, Dark Matter, on the Amphia label run by Cons and Vlad Caia. His fourth LP, Lyra, appeared in 2019 once more on Meander, accompanied simultaneously by the ambient counterpart Lyra Pi.