15th May 2026
Christopher Nosnibor
Shaded Houses is an ambient project based in Sicily, ‘built,’, as they say, ‘entirely on instrumental, minimal, drum-less soundscapes’. Family Trees is their debut album, and it’s been released by the UK label Wormhole World. There’s something somehow warming about underground and emerging acts having their work released by labels overseas or otherwise non-domestic. It’s a reminder that while so much of the Internet, especially social media, is simply a toxic, bot-ridden hellhole of hate and antagonism, the world wide web can still be a medium for positive and constructive ends, and also that in a time of extreme polarity and division when it comes to politics and perspectives, music remains a remarkably unifying power. Of course, some music is overtly political (and that can also prove to possess bonding qualities), but there is much which is entirely removed from all that stuff, and offers a space apart, a safe space, of sorts, where there is simply a connection with the human condition, or even simply the language of sound.
Family Trees is exemplary. It’s an exploratory auditory cruise which leads the listener on a journey, one which traverses far from all the shit and into another realm entirely.
The songs are numbered sequentially, with their titles in parenthesis. The significance of this is unclear, but as a formal construct, it works quite nicely.
‘One (Minimally Conscious)’ is almost fourteen minutes in duration, and manifests as a groaning, multi-tonal drone, almost akin to an organ, but not quite – a semi-synthetic trilling wheeze which hovers and hums, the polyphony occasionally creating a humming, trilling, rubbing together of notes. At times it’s the sonic equivalent of the slow puffing of a giant bellows, but when additional layers creep in, by stealth, into the mix.
Family Trees succeeds in slipping under the mental radar – which is a key in defining ambient, I would say, in that by definition, ‘ambience’ is in the air, it’s background. But as I’m happily soaking in the drift, I find I’m suddenly alert, spine stiffened, eyes roving, on the arrival of ‘Four (Shaded House)’, which brings scraping, sonorous drones and a thick, woozy, nauseous atmosphere with the trebly trilling which interweave in an uncomfortable ebb and flow, which sometimes feels like it’s surging backwards, and probably is. It’s a testing seven minutes, uncomfortable, tense, as you wonder just how this all sits together. Thick, resonant tones vibrate in your chest as you wonder… you wonder… you wonder, how safe actually are you?
‘Five (Ascension)’ does, in all truth, feel transcendental, as slow, delicate piano combines with long, quivering drones which float and ultimately fade. It carries a rare richness in sonic terms.
The subsequent silence is strange. All I hear is the thrum of the bathroom extractor fan. But this is the way that Family Trees lands.
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Aural Aggravation 