This is the kind of ambient music that keeps you soaring through celestial bodies, either at the cosmic stage or in the depths of your inner self.
The album is the second outing this year by Remaining Warmth, the new musical project by Andrey Novozhilov (Trna, Olhava, and Reverb On Repeat). On the first release (here is our review), Pavel Kolosov (APRS, Alles Wird In Flammen Stehen, Ashen Throne, Volkota) joined as a guest, but by now he is a full member of the project. Together they make this engaging reverberating, guitar-based music for each listener to interpret on their own. I do not think two listener will have the same experience with this music. It is meditative and reflective, always revolving around a melodic theme.
The musicians are joined by guest drummer, blastbeatology, on this album – adding an exciting new dimension to this Blackgaze-based music. There were beats and drums on the last album, too, but not as versatile as on this. At first listen, one might be a bit overwhelmed by the blasting and rumbling drums, but after a couple of listens, you notice how well they’re integrated with the cascading and gushing musical sound effects that make out the album.
As with other releases from these artists, one can either take the cue from the album´s title and the tracks´ titles to try to get what the artists have envisioned for their music, or just forget the titles and flow along in one’s own ruminative state. What is remarkable is that it is just as good to use as a background sound carpet when you are doing other things, as it is to have your earphones on and allow yourself to completely lost in the music, forgetting the tumultuous world for 40 minutes.
The album is made up of reverberating and looping sounds mostly from the guitars, supported by drums and sometimes a low-end bass. It creates a whole that is difficult to dissect without analyzing the music to death, and thus, any description becomes futile. The melodies that flow through each track are filled with beauty, yearning, and longing, and become extremely cinematic and put some fresh wind under your imagination’s wings. For example, this being the wintertime with the occasional Northern Lights, I cannot think of a better music in my earphones than the fourth track, “In Dreams, We’re Not Apart”. It is an extremely cinematic piece of music to listen to when gazing at the Northern Light prancing across a multi-colored sky.
Or maybe we should think of the music as a soundtrack to hypnopompia, as the title of the album, and some of the songs, especially the last ones, may allude to this. As the music hovers somewhere in the middle of Blackgaze and Ambient, it is perfect to depict the state we all are in just before we wake up after a long night´s sleep. The soaring, lucid, captive, and often hypnotic music certainly portrays the state of hypnopompia, if you want to interpret it in that way. In this state, which is common to all people, we can experience sensory hallucinations and vivid, although often elusive, dreams.
The contrast with the sometimes glistening and glimmering soaring themes conjured from the sounds and the raging, rumbling and rhythmic drums makes for an exciting tension on this album. And if we ponder on this hypnopompia idea a bit further, the drums might be the contrast to our dreams and the reality that meets us when we wake up.
Well, all this useless ruminating, trying somehow to pin down a meaning behind the album: It is another remarkable album by these artists, that has an inexhaustible well of not only creativity but also a stunning knack for engaging melodious themes intertwined in the cascades of reverberating timbre. They end the album with a 15-minute pinnacle of Blackgaze: the title track “When the Night Ends”. Seldom can such a kaleidoscopic, beautiful music be heard, especially when they introduce the emotional, crystal clear ebbing and flowing vocals of the female artist Maria of Copper Mountains. I recommend that you head over to her Bandcamp page and pick up her discography of singles and an EP. You will not regret it. And you will not regret immersing yourself in yet another stunning release with explorative and extensive Blackgaze from Novozhilov & Co. Sometimes it is so beautiful it might hurt a bit.
