wøunds 'Nocturne' [Digital]

Sound is a dependable guide through the dark; surrender to it and it will carry you where your feet cannot. ‘Nocturne’ is an album that leads you past time into the spacious natural worlds and elemental landscapes found within it. Where are you walking through? Sound is the only true compass. Slowly, places unfold before you; you are surrounded, embraced by buildings, roads, tall grasses moving in the wind, a river, valleys transformed into land art. By means of echolocation, you move across huge sculptures made of sand and reverb.

Listening to ‘Nocturne’ is experiencing texture in motion, like cinema without light. As the album unveils its story, the character is the landscape itself, moving, as if watched through a trap camera. You follow the intuited road to somewhere, somewhere desolate and beautiful, monolithic, yet in perpetual change. Orchestral, at times, oceanic and colossal, the album also reveals flashes of the quotidian; just enough to uncloak a poetic inclination in its attentive listening of both the immense and the slight. The tall mountains erode and leave you bare with yourself. You go back into the night where you came from.

– Ana Cristina Pérez

Ethereal doom percolates through tiny cracks in the bedrock, digging into the earth’s center, where sonic explosions expand into spectral drones. Electronics whirr through the viscous atmosphere, elucidated shards cutting through the spacious aural blankets. Dramatic highlights glow, becoming melodic serotonin releases trickling through our veins and inhabiting every pore. So much of Nocturne is all-encompassing that it’s overwhelming, but that’s where its emotional depth emerges. Eyes closed, relaxed in the darkness, these sounds wash away everything to open a new, liminal dimension.

— Foxy Digitalis