Archive for the ‘Albums’ Category

gintas k – Mountains, runlets, caves & cascades

Posted: 21 August 2022 in Albums
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gk. rec. – 13th August 2022

Christopher Nosnibor

Since taking control of his own release schedule – in addition to various releases via various labels – Gintas K’s output has shifted from rivulets to cascades, with this nature-themed album being just one among countless releases, live performances, exhibitions. soundtrack and compilation appearances so far this year, and, not least of all, Lėti in May, released on venerable experimental label Crónica.

There’s little explanation behind Mountains, runlets, caves & cascades, beyond a selection of quotes from HP Lovecraft and the detail that the album’s six pieces were ‘played, recorded live, at once without any overdub; using computer, midi keyboard & controller’ in 2020, and one suspects Gintas has a hard drive bursting with such recordings just waiting to be edited and mastered to form unified documents of his tireless output.

The first five pieces form the larger work that sits under the album’s overarching title, numbered one to five. They’re sparse, minimal, echo-heavy, like wandering around in a vast cavern while droplets fall into the subterranean lake that occupies the bottom, and who knows how deep it may be, how many tunnels are filled with millions of gallons of water that have run down through the ground and into this naturally-carved warren of rock-lined corridors beneath the ground.

In places, barely perceptible glimmers of sound, like bat sonar, jangle in the upper reaches of the audio spectrum. I’m reminded of the cat repellent device in my back yard, and I wonder if to some, these passages would actually appear as silence – or if for others, like my ten-year-old daughter, they would find the pitch unbearable and have to run from the room covering their ears. Quiet gurgles and trickles are the primary sounds on ‘Mountains, runlets, caves & cascades #3’ and I find myself feeling altogether calmer, picturing myself in a pine woodland with steep banks. I picture in my mind’s eye local scenery like Aysgarth Falls and Ingleton Falls and find myself at ease – but this being Gintas K, there’s disruption afoot, and blips and squelches zap in seemingly at random to remind us that this is digital art, and the fourteen-minute ‘#4’ marks the full transition into digital froth and sluices of laptop-generated foam.

And so it trickles into ‘#5’ which brings more bleeps and blips and jangling and some high-pitched rattling that for some reason makes me think of seeing footage of milk bottling plants in the 80s – back when milk came in glass bottles, and I trip on this trajectory of nostalgic reverie until the arrival oof the unsettling final track, the eight-minute ‘eastern bells’ that’s a slowed-down yawn of sound, metallic reverberations ringing out into the silence, echoing in the dark emptiness in ebbs and flows, like a conglomeration of sounds, drifting in a breeze.

Mountains, runlets, caves & cascades is a supremely abstract work, and while it’s not a huge departure for Gintas K, it does represent one of his softer, gentler, sparser and less frenetic works. It’s by no means an album to mediate to. But it is overall fairly sedate, and it not only allows, but encourages a certain quiet reflection.

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Darkroom – Fallout 4

Posted: 20 August 2022 in Albums
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Expert Sleepers – 25th August 2022

Christopher Nosnibor

Fallout 4 is, as the title suggests, the fourth album in Darkroom’s Fallout trilogy.

Darkroom have been going for more than twenty years now, and have built up an extensive catalogue centred around fluid ambient work, which they’re keen to point out ‘stretches the definition of the genre to its limits in many directions: from quiet, introspective and naturalistic through celestial and melodic to intense, abrasive and synthetic.’

In presenting three longform compositions, Fallout 4 affords the collective to fully explore all of these elements.

As the accompanying notes explain, ‘Darkroom’s music has always been played not programmed, with a focus on human interaction and capturing the magic of live performance’, and the first two pieces hark back to the last performance of their 2012 tour. ‘It’s Clear from the Air’ is hypnotic, rippling, mesmerising, low, undulating drones providing a subtle low end to the textured interweaving synths that overlay subtle yet complex rhythms.

It bleeds into the twenty-five minute ‘Qaanaak (Parts 1 & 2)’ and immediately the tone is darker, denser, with a grumbling low and needling pulsations that create tension within the suffocatingly thick, beatless smoggy atmosphere. You find yourself lost, in suspension, somewhat bewildered as the tones twist and change. Electronic flares whip and lash as stuttering beats emerge through the relentlessly nagging pulsations, and continue to shift and mutate to a broiling, bubbling larva as booming bass tones surge and swell. The rhythm grows in urgency, but it’s muffled, constrained, which heightens the experience of a sense of airlessness and entrapment and as much as the throbbing oscillations are indebted to Can and Tangerine Dream, their abrasive edge hints at the uneasy, wheezing synth grind of Suicide.

The third piece, ‘Tuesday’s Ghost’ is perhaps the most conventionally ambient’ of the three, and is certainly the most overtly ‘background’ as is swims and floats and chimes along fuzzy lines of slow decay and loose, vague forms that have no shape, rise and fall. There is a discreet linearity to it, as it gradually, and subtly builds in depth and density, and it’s here that it become clear just how essential that human element is to Darkroom’s work – that sense of musicians bouncing off one another and understanding one another through intuition. There is no substitute for it, and you simply can’t programme the dynamics of form. It’s this intuitive, natural fluidity that breathes life into the compositions, and in turn, it’s this sense of life that the listener connects to and engages with. Fallout 4 may be ambient at heart or by genre… but it’s also far beyond the frontier of ambient.

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Voicecoil – Strange Days

Posted: 19 August 2022 in Albums
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5th August 2022

Christopher Nosnibor

Lately, I’ve been seeing people on the Internet bemoaning the number of ‘lockdown’ albums, and even the emergence of ‘lockdown’ novels, questioning the need for anything that recreates, recounts, reflects upon or is otherwise set during the most recent of historical events. They all seem to make more or less the same case – that we all went through it, it was bad enough, and there’s no need to harp on or relive it. But artists tend to process and comprehend the world and their experiences of it through the act of creation, and just because we all experienced the pandemic and various lockdowns, no two people will have had the exact same experience or the exact same psychological response. Besides, isn’t more or less all art some form of response or reaction to the human condition, or otherwise a reflection thereof? No-one beefs about an excessive amount of war novels or poems or various genre novels, like crime or sci-fi or fantasy. Perhaps it’s because they prefer escapism to real life.

As the accompanying blurbage explains, ‘This album is a reflection of the dark days the world has seen in recent years. It’s about the tragedies many of us have faced and the effort to find the will to fight on. We remember those we have lost because it is through them that we carry on into tomorrow’.

Strange Days is pitched as ‘a symbolic re-birth for the project, returning with a new zeal to create and perform’, and it’s not short on pumping beats and rippling synths. What sets it apart from so many other industrial / electropop / darkwave hybrids is Voicecoil’s vocal: it’s in that gothy baritone region, but for all of that, and the sense of performance and theatre that comes with those well-established genre tropes, his delivery had a certain emotional depth and sincerity that lifts the songs to another level.

So where ‘Versterbrogade’ comes on like a dance remix of a Depeche Mode in terms of its musical arrangement, and the verses observe the popular style of singing in the throat, a wheezy, grit-edged monotone, the verses unleash the hook and some ‘proper’ singing with heart and soul, and in doing so breathes life into the bleak experience of life where days drift and fade into one another. ‘Speak in Sine’ brings a harder-edged beat and a starker atmosphere, and it sits well with the themes of dislocation and alienation which run through the lyrics. ‘No Easy Reply’ is remarkably sensitive, not to mention accessible, and Strange Days has some great tunes, from the expansive, pulsating yet reflective ‘Why’ to the brooding piano-led curtain-closer of ‘Drift’.

While electronic music – particularly of that dark pop / industrial / goth disco persuasion – can often suffer from feeling sterile, detached, robotic, and impersonal, Strange Days is anything but. It possesses a certain warmth, a humanity, that resonates on numerous levels.

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Konstrukt & Peter Brötzmann – Dolunay

Posted: 16 August 2022 in Albums
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Karlrecords – 26th August 2022

Christopher Nosnibor

Konstrukt – the Istanbul-based collective led by multi-instrumentalist Umut Çağlar and reeds player Korhaan Futaci have, in their fourteen-year career amassed an impressive catalogue of works, many in collaboration with international luminaries of the experimental / jazz scene.

As the accompanying notes detail, ‘The German Free Jazz titan [Peter Brötzmann] was invited to the Deneyevi Studio in the Turkish capital in November 2008 where they recorded Dolunay, an album that was released three years later on a small label in Turkey only. Back then a quartet with drums AND percussion, guitar, reeds but NO bass player, KONSTRUKT and their iconic guest took off on a session full of fire and fury: shrieking reeds, thundering drums andandand… Free Jazz of the wildest, most energetic and kathartic (afterwards) kind!

And so, eleven years after its release, and a full fourteen since its recording, the epic that is Dolunay finally gets a vinyl release, having been remastered for the format. Karlrecords haven’t skimped, either: the six tracks, spanning just short of an hour, has been laid across four sides of 180-gram vinyl.

Now, oftentimes, double-vinyl pressings feel like a bit of a cash-in geared at audiophile snobs and hardcore collectors – you know the kind, who will drivel on endlessly about the superiority of gold-plated plugs and shit (and I say that as both a vinyl fan and owner of separates, but also someone who accept the limitations of human hearing, especially after years of live music) – butt this, this truly deserves the treatment.

Because of the slightly awkward track lengths in relative terms, they pack ‘Dolunay’ and ‘Siyah’ – at ten-plus minutes apiece onto the first side, but the advantage of this that the listener gets to feel the cumulative power of the slow-simmer of the wandering discord. Thee drums clatter and roll, but they’re subdued and distant on the title track while the brass weaves frantic. As one saxophone withers and slumps, puffed out and weary, another rises in its place to honk to the heavens. ‘Siyah’ is sparse and slow to begin, and almost smooth at times, before an unexpected twist toward the humming, thrumming, cacophonous a few minutes in – and by the mid-point, it’s a sustained explosion of sound. ‘Kurtlar’ nags and spirals with a twist of Eastern exotica, but then… then…

No, I don’t love this kind of thing – I often find it too much – way too much. I spend so much time just willing for it to end. But then, equally, I find myself marvelling not at the musicianship, but the audacity. And then along comes along a piece like ‘Makinalı’ and for all of the hectic rolling percussion and wandering reeds, there’s some tranquillity, at least to begin, and the breathing space allows time for reflection, and the realisation that this s quite remarkable, in technical terms… but then before long it’s a swarm of hornets in your head and aaaagh!

In its field, its exemplary, and pushes the parameters of free jazz to the max – but that also means that it is challenging, hard work even – but of course, hard work always brings its rewards.

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### – Nasilno

Posted: 15 August 2022 in Albums
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9th May 2022

Christopher Nosnibor

Back in the spring of last year it was our honour to stream ‘Pretvorivši se u ogradu, prošao sam kroz ogradu’ by Croatian noisemakers ### (which, their Bandcamp page advises is ‘pronounced by hitting a random object three times’) from the Nim Brut compilation Deprived of Occupation and Pleasure We Feast. And now they’re back with a full-length release in the form of the seven-track Nasilno. Produced by the band’s bassist, Anja Tkalec, they’ve made a conscious shift from using unusual locations in which to record, and instead spent some time camped out in Rattus Rattus studio in Zagreb ‘which allowed the band to fully record the wall of noise that is well known to all those who witnessed their concerts’.

The titles and lyrics may be lost in translation, but equally lost in a totally shredding, overloading wall of noise. There are magnificent quiet passages – brief as they are – and there are strong elements of post-rock and post-metal as well as the grainy, timeless analogue of Neurosis and associated acts, and they pack countless twists and turns in the sinewy, dynamic five minutes of opener ‘Jer život je ljepši kad se zaustavi’, with tense builds and an abrupt ending that collapses the expectation of a crescendo.

The blistering ‘Negativ cvijeće’ cuts free of genre to deliver a cataclysmic sonic blast that in time yields to shrieks and yowls of sculpted feedback atop crunching riffs, and of post-rock ad post-metal tropes have begun to grow weary – and yes, it’s fair to say that many of them have – ### breathe new life into them and then some. They also bring plenty of their own angles and a unique energy to proceedings: ‘Jednom kad tebe ostavim Satano’ and ‘Pretvorivši se u ogradu, prošao sam kroz ogradu’ have the angular jolt of Shellac, but the but the forrmer brings the juggernaut riffage of the likes of Amenra, and while it may not even extend to three-and-a-half minutes in duration, it’s expansive, solid, immense in scope and sound, and hot after lands the seven-and-a-half-minute ‘Oprostite, što u taj sumrak pada’ which blasts soaring riffs and squalls of feedback on a truly epic scale.

They do a lot with only a little: instrumentally, they work with a conventional rock format of instrumentation, but sonically, they’re staggeringly ambitious, and so often sound greater than the sum of their parts. Closer ‘Dvanaest boja za nasilje’ goes full Sunn O))) with grating drone and eternal feedback hums, and it makes for an intense and powerful eleven minutes of organ-kneeding that’s equally exhilarating and exhausting, in that it seems to go on for ever.

Nasilno is not an easy album, and it’s not an album that confirms to any one form or genre: it’s abrasive, angular, challenging – and GOOD!

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Petrol Hoers – Please Note Intentional Misspelling of Horse

Posted: 15 August 2022 in Albums
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26th August 2022

Christopher Nosnibor

How did this happen? How?? I mean, it’s no bad thing – quite the opposite, in fact – but somehow, a joke band so jokey as so seem almost mythological has broken through, not just on the local scene, but nationally and with songs being played on high-profile radio stations like BBC introducing and even 6Music. They’re a way off beating Shed 7 as York’s most renowned act, but they really are gunning hard for national status right now, following the success of Oh I Don’t Know, Just Horse Stuff, I Guess and now Please Note Intentional Misspelling of Horse.

To look at the covers of early Petrol Hoers albums – or indeed, alboms – is likely enough to deter most sane people – cartoon horses with toilet-wall scrawled enormophalluses provide the housing for messy combinations of hardcore techno and grindcore, the most improbably of hybrids imaginable rendered cheaply and with not only a knowing, but a gleeful lack of sophistication.

So what happened? Not much, really, at least on the face of things. The material is still very much centred around shameful horse puns and so on, and their sound is still a weird mash-up of techno and industrial metal, kinda like Revolting Cocks gone even wronger than on recent tours. The cover art’s been toned down a bit (Horse Stuff featured Danny elegantly draped in a dressing gown in his horse head mask), and some hard touring alongside mates Horse Bastard turned the nation on to all things equine seems to be about the summary of the turn in favour for the act whose most renowned merch is a T-shirt that was born out of a hilarious misunderstanding with the printers, bearing the slogan ‘“PETROL HOERS” IN COMIC SANS CENTRE FRONT BIG AS YOU CAN TA’.

Danny Buckley isn’t daft, and the whole HOERS project is very much an escape for him – but he does it all so well. From the relentless, eye-bleeding block caps posts on social media to the tie-dye T-shirts and pants, HOERS are the full package, so to speak.

Lead single, ‘Captain Me Space Daddy’ has already had some radio play, which is an incredible achievement, considering that it’s an aggressive shouty racket that switches from grating aggrotech to some kind of cheesy Eurovision pop shanty meets early Wax Trax! that’s 100% what the fuck.

It’s exemplary of the album as a whole: fast and frantic – Ali G rapping over chiptune Cossack disco in a head-on collision with full-on raging metal abrasion with raw-throated hollering vocals. It is utterly absurd, and even knowing what to expect, you still find yourself dazed by the audacity of this insane hybrid that singlehandedly knells the death toll for postmodernism, because now, it really has all been done. The thing is – and make no mistake, it’s absolutely genius – even if you absolutely hate it, it’s impossible to deny the audacity and to admire it. ‘Honk if You Like Donk’ is pretty much self-explanatory, while ‘You Can Give Horse a Buckfast’ is a balls-out rager that slips into some kind of lederhosen-slapping ho(rs)edown. ‘You can give a horse a Buckfast / but you’ll never see me drink’, snarls the tee-total Hoers. Wait, he does this shit sober? Oh yes.

It kicks off – and boy, it kicks off – with the Hi-NRG happy horsecore / doom-grind crossover of ‘It’s Just a Mask’, and one feels for all the horseplay, there’s something quite insightful and honest about this. ‘I Would Die for Mr Crunchy’ finds The Hoers spitting vitriol about politicians and the monarchy, and again illustrates that for all the frippery and puerile puns, there is some genuine substance here, and Hoers are by no means completely crass and two-dimensional.

Closer ‘Biblically Accurate Horse’ is a pumping techno tune that invites worthy comparisons to PIG and KMFDM. It’s a bangin’ finish to a bangin’ album, and yes, yes, it really does bang all the way. It’s completely barmy, and that’s precisely why it’s brilliant.

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Esmerine – Everything Was Forever Until It Was No More

Posted: 6 August 2022 in Albums
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Christopher Nosnibor

Everything Was Forever Until It Was No More is such a quintessentially post-rock album title: without hearing a note, it evokes the spirit of 2003-2006 or thereabouts. On listening, it’s perhaps not as overtly post-rock as all that – it’s not a slow-building crescendo-fest with chiming guitars like Explosions in the Sky or even lesser-known acts like And So I Watch You From Afar, but with ties to legends in the field, it is every inch of that milieu, with ‘the cello of Rebecca Foon (Saltland, Set Fire To Flames, Silver Mt Zion) and the marimba of ex-Godspeed You! Black Emperor percussionist Bruce Cawdron at its core’.

It’s been a full five years since their last album, 2017’s Mechanics of Dominion, and during this time the Montreal-based collective have been doing what, it seems, the Montreal post-rock scene does best – detaching themselves from the world and conjuring magnificent, magical soundscapes that offer a conduit to planes of pure escapism.

Everything Was Forever Until It Was No More presents a rich sonic tapestry that incorporates a broad range of elements. The press released makes mention of ‘emotive chamber works using threads of post-classical, post-rock, Minimalism, neo-Baroque, jazz, pop and a wide array of folk traditions’ as being Esmerine’s palette.

‘Blackout’ opens the album with a soft, elegant piano draped with brooding strings that’s graceful, subtly emotive, and easy on the ear. ‘Entropy: Incantation – Radiance – The Wild Sea’, the first of the two-part ‘Entropy’ suite is a nine-minute journey through atmospheric ambience, where one treads with trepidation, uncertain of what may be hidden in the shadows. There’s an aura of ancient mysticism that echoes before eventually, the track refocuses toward a driving prog rock finale.

The beauty and joy of such a work is that while there are undoubtedly inspirations and emotions poured into the compositions, such wide spaces without words offer the listener a vessel into which to empty their own experiences and interpretations, and as such, a piece like the seven-minute ‘Imaginary Pasts’ with its lilting piano, roiling drums, and textured guitar work which trips out into hazy space offers so much scope for the listener to invest and reflect upon their own imaginary pasts. Such invitations to meditate on life and to journey into inner space are extremely welcome when life is so relentless.

Despite the title seemingly alluding to a sense of nostalgia, Everything Was Forever feels more like a work that creates its own space in time, rather than reflecting on a time past. Three of the four final tracks are under three minutes each in length, and as such, are almost dream-like fragments, and the listener finds themselves wandering through chiming bells and rippling notes that dapple like sunlight through trees in a breeze on ‘Wakesleep’, before ‘Number Stations’ guides the way not towards the light, but through a murky sonic swamp or eerie echoes before taking its final magnificent form, and reminds us that, ultimately, nothing is forever, and everything is just a fleeting moment in the scheme of eternity.

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elkyn – holy spirit social club

Posted: 5 August 2022 in Albums
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Curation Records

Christopher Nosnibor

Elkyn is very much about the slow burn, the gradual diffusion, both musically and in terms of career trajectory. Joey Donnelly unveiled elkyn in 2020, having made the subtle shift from performing as elk and releasing the magnificently understated beech EP in 2019. Since then, he’s continued to release a steady stream off beautifully-crafted singles as teasers for the album, the most recent of which, ‘if you’re still leaving’ emerged in March of this year. Interestingly, the melody bears certain parallels with U2’s ‘Where the Streets Have No Name’, but nothing could be further from the bombast of the stadium-fillers’ epic: this is introspective bedroom indie, quiet and contemplative; there’s no ego, no pomp, no big production. ‘So this is it,’ he sings with a weak resignation.

So while progress certainly hasn’t been slow, it’s not exactly been swift, either, and listening to holy spirit social club seemingly explains why. To begin with, there’s the level of detail in the arrangements: on the surface, they’re fairly sparse, simple, acoustic works, but listen closely and there is so much more to hear, from delicate bass and washes of synth, rolling drums and incidental interludes with rippling piano and more. Reverb and layering are applied subtly and judiciously, too, and these things don’t happen by accident, but through a close and careful ear on every bar. The absence of capitalisation may niggle a pedant like me, but it’s clearly another conscious decision and rather than coming across like an irritating affectation, feels more like another aspect of elkyn’s self-opinion, the small ‘i’ indicative of a kind of abasement, while in no way seeking sympathy or validation. It’s a cliché to the point of a running joke when musicians say they write songs for themselves and aren’t bothered if anyone likes them, but with elkyn, it seems genuinely plausible: these songs are so intimate, it’s as if he’s playing them under the assumption no-one else will ever hear them.

If ‘found the back of the tv remote’ (another single cut) sounds like dreamy, winsome indie, it’s equally reminiscent of Dinosaur Jr’s more stripped back moments, and Donnelly shares that sense of almost being embarrassed to be audible as he sings comes through in J Mascis’ delivery. But then, this leads us to the second reason why elkyn isn’t banging stuff out every few weeks – these songs are intensely intimate, and filled with vulnerability and self-criticism, and one suspects that tendency to self-critique extends to his recordings in the same was as social situations, relationships, and life in general.

But while the tone is plaintive, mournful, regretful, sad, that isn’t the vibe of the songs in themselves, because elkyn manages to infuse every song with a certain optimism, the melancholy flavoured with hope. There’s a breeziness, a brightness, I might even say a ‘summeriness’ about many of the songs on holy spirit social club that renders them uplifting. But even at its saddest, most disconsolate and dejected, holy spirit social club brings joy simply by virtue of being so achingly wonderful in every way.

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Crooniek – Trail Of Time

Posted: 1 August 2022 in Albums
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Christopher Nosnibor

And here I am, presented with Trail Of Time, the new album from Darkwave/’Neo-Fanfare" Band, Crooniek, and album which, thematically, ‘reflects on the concept of time. In particular, the inspiration for Trail Of Time is the conflict between the known past and the unwritten future. The future remains hidden and we do not yet know it. But we do know the past’.

It’s a relatable concept, and according to the blurbage, ‘This album is a nostalgic journey through the past of driving force Gerry Croon, his musical projects (‘Parade of the ‘Funeral Fanfare’) and his relationship with his own birthplace Kampenhout, a small village in Belgium, known for his chicory cultivation.’

I much prefer chicory cultivation to Chicory Tip, because ‘Son of My Father’ is limp glam toss, and as such, Crooniek also win my approval for this altogether darker, non-glam album effort.

With slow, plodding beats and mournful brass, Trail Of Time is the absolute in nostalgia, the sound of cobbled streets and horse-drawn carriages, of bygone ages captured in black and white in sepia stills.

‘Would You Wake Me In Time’ is more a triumphalist medieval / martial oompah, and then again, there’s ‘At the Lemmeken Monument’ with its samples and sparse synths and eerie glockenspiel.

You could never call this album dull. For the most part, it is very much a work of nostalgia-laden post-rock, and it’s layered deep with sad strings and detailed but dolorous orchestration. ‘Condemned to the Fire’ somehow straddles ‘Greensleeves’ and I Like Trains circa Elegies to Lessons Learnt, and ‘Melancholy at Toorfbroek’ is classic post-rock.

It isn’t until halfway through that we get vocals, and for the most part, Trail of Time is an instrumental work, making single cut ‘G_B’ both a standout and an anomaly. It’s also a killer tune, in any context.

Perhaps ironically, as steeped in turn-of-the century and interwar nostalgia as it is, Trail of Time evokes – at least for me – more of the spirit of the turn of the millennium and the post-rock explosion if 2001 to 2005 or thereabouts. I say thereabouts because no time period has a definite start or end: there is a blurring, crossover, an intersection. And painful as it is to admit, 2004 is receding rapidly into the past: there are children born in 2004 who are now adults.

Time marches on, whether you like it or accept it or not. Breathe in, and breathe deep. Smell the present; smell the past: you never know if or when you will again.

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nihiti – Sustained

Posted: 31 July 2022 in Albums
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Lo Bit Landscapes – 7th July 2022

Christopher Nosnibor

Life has felt somewhat relentless of late. I do mean this on a personal level, although this is perhaps as much a result off external factors as anything else. The pandemic turned me into an addict. An addict of 24/7 steaming news, of doomscrolling, of relentless checking of social media. When things are constantly happening constantly evolving, it’s easy to find yourself dragged into the whirlwind, and ultimately to depend on the maelstrom. Silence becomes scary. You’re overwhelmed by the volume of emails, texts, FaceBook messages and WhatsApps and find yourself begging for them to stop, but when they do, you panic that something is wrong, that there’s something more sinister afoot, something isn’t working, or that perhaps you’ve died and haven’t realised.

Lately, there’s been a tidal wave of music that’s been created as a reaction to life in lockdown, to social tension, to the mental health pressures of contemporary living. And I’ve been lapping it up, I’ve been loving it. Because people are bringing issues out into the open, and speaking in their own voice about the difficulties we’ve all been facing, relaying those relatable traumas. But I’ve started to feel more like a silent counsellor rather than a music critic. It’s a truism that a problem shared is a problem halved, unless you’re the recipient of all of the sharing. Sometimes, you need a break. Sometimes, you need to let all the tension go, and to simply float.

Nihiti’s Sustained is the perfect antidote to all the tension. It consists of three slow-moving ambient works, extensive in their duration. The shortest, ‘Tetrachrome’ is almost ten minutes long, and it opens with the immense, twenty-one-and-a-half-minute soft soundscape of ‘Stellar Observer’. I sit back by candlelight and close my eyes, and feel my jaw slowly unclench, and my shoulder blades gradually begin to loosen. It’s soporific, deep ambience that washes over you and with washing waves of sound and soft, elongated mollifies drones that drift like vapour. It isn’t without turbulence, but said distortion and treble waves crash a way in the distance and charge against a backdrop of slow undulations. The broad, textured sounds are indeed sustained, for what feels like eternities, and the yawn that swells in my jaws is one of relaxation rather than boredom.

There are glitches and switches in ‘If the Colour’ that disturb the flow, and you almost feel yourself tripping momentarily, like a sleep twitch, but things soon right themselves again, and you resume your calmness, despite scratchy samples and moments of dissonance, because in the overall sensory experience, Sustained is slow and gentle.

Breathe it in, absorb the vapours. Ignore the distant voices as they whisper and echo, and assume they mean no harm, despite the darkening sky toward the end. Let it simply hang in the air: sit back, turn down the lights, and tune in to your inner voice instead of the inaudible mutters. Trust your instruct. Trust the space. Absorb the calm.

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