Room40 – 16th October 2026
Christopher Nosnibor
Writing on Lost Meridians, Jonathan Wilson observes that ‘traditional instrumentation is manipulated, twisted, stretched and weaved into endless webs. Recorded with whatever was at hand, like a phone or single mic, these short and sharp moments have been pushed far beyond their original convention. Sparkling highs and low sub sonics seem to linger throughout asking more questions than offering answers,’ adding ‘this is music to pause to, this is music to slow down to, this is music to dream to… But mostly, this is music to remind us that sometimes the unexplained things around us are just as important as the things inside us’.
The unexplained has – at least for those of us who are a certain age – connotations of The X Files, but also, to an extent, Tales of the Unexpected, and The Twilight Zone, resurrected post-millennium.
Now, some of the things – at least where the titles are concerned – on Lost Meridians are quire easily explained, not least of all the first composition, ‘Mountains, standing steadfast’. It’s gentle, slow, contemplative, hazy, and in many ways reflects, in sonic form, the experience of gazing up at peaks, partly obscured by cloud, in a moment of calm.
Each autumn, I make a trip with my daughter to the Lake District. We stay in a cottage on the shore of Windermere. The cottage has a private jetty, and we scattered some of my wife’s ashes there the first year we went. Looking across the water towards the ridge on the far shore, and, behind that, Coniston Old Man, I have felt that sense of stillness that comes from being in nature, and also the sense of insignificance. The mountains, the lakes, were here millennia before us, and will remain for millennia after. We’re just passing through, and all we can really do is make the most of the time we have, however brief – and for some, it’s briefer than others. I find comfort and solace in the fact she knew and loved this magnificent landscape, and we shared time in it, as a family, and that consequently, our daughter feels a deep attachment to these surroundings, too.
‘At First Light’ features almost unfiltered folk elements, with a gently-strummed classical guitar standing in the foreground against a vague, eddying background, which at times tapers off to nearly nothing, while the immense, nebular drift of ‘A Vastness, unresolved’ mirrors the connotations evoked by the title perfectly. Indeed, we exist as dots within a vastness that’s beyond comprehension, and as such can never be resolved.
‘Across a line’ consists of two parts, the first of which chimes and rings but briefly before fading out to be replaced by a droning roar – heavy rain? a waterfall? wind? static? – which in turn fades beneath a soft watercolour wash of sound, and it’s remarkably soothing. The pairing of the final two pieces, ‘Fractures in Silence’ and the title track, are each six and a half minutes in length. The former takes the form of a long, slow undulation, which sounds in some respects like the dying wheeze of a broken church organ, culminating in what sounds something like an elongated cymbal crash and frozen-frame electronic glitch. The latter gradually fades in, a low, rumbling hum which hangs like a dense, churning sonic cloud.
Over the course of the album’s forty-one minutes, Rösner creates some richly atmospheric moments, the elements interwoven into a magnificently textured tapestry.
AA
