Only in Retrospect

Released 2015-11-27.

This album is unlike anything else I've made as it's mostly an ambient album with minimal beats. The tracks feature a ton of reverb and delay and that's why I say it was recorded in a glass house (but I'm not sure if they actually sound like that).

The idea of the album started with Nuit, which was originally a house track not very different from all my other stuff. I thought it was kinda lame though, so I removed all the beats and simply let the main melody play on a loop without interference for four minutes, steadily increasing the reverb as it progressed. I loved it. Interim, Vibre, and Pom'st follow the same formula. I simply love the strange atmosphere of Vibre, with its vibraphone melody slowly glitching away into nothingness.

Simple is the oldest song in any of my albums, and the first song I made when I tried FLStudio for the first time back in 2010. Of course, it's so rearranged it's unrecognizable, but I think it's a very powerful and beautiful ending to the first half of the album. The following tracks Reiteration, Knights and Glos feature longer melodies and leave the realm of ambient music for a while with added beats.

I try to end the album with a bang with Thees. A sample loop is recognizable at first, but it's quickly mauled by a million distortion and reverberation effects that somehow build a landscape that I enjoy greatly. The song eventually collapses and fades away to silence. Listening to this track is interesting now, because The Caretaker does the same thing (in a much grander scale) in stages 4 and 5 of Everywhere at the End of Time, so maybe that's why I like those two albums so much. I'd love to do a full ambient album of tracks like Thees someday.

The cover art is an illustration from the book The Story of a Nutcracker by Alexandre Dumas and published by Bernard Poloniecki's Polish Bookstore in 1927.

Listen on Bandcamp