Warsaw-based composer Stefan Węgłowski‘s usual work is within the area of small ensembles and at times for solo instruments.
But for his first release on the Glacial Movements label, it sounds as though he has uncovered a cocooned world, with electronic sounds thrumming and reverberating, half-heard through gauze, oblique movements that hint at places unknown, though a welcome sense of stasis pervades. The feeling of a warm railway waiting room is strong on opener “Deep Light”, with muffled voices – reminders of the everyday world lurking outside the portal – encroaching on the solitude.
Notes are freed in a brief flash of light but then subsumed in the nebulous drift of “Ray Of Night”. It washes over us, containing half-remembered hints, dwelling within a solitary piano world that could lift you up and carry you away. As the album progresses, so you feel any connection with Earth slowly diminishing as we travel further into the distance. The sounds grow sparser, casting us adrift, a surprising voice appears, an imaginary tether that in actual fact only seeks to emphasise the growing orbit.You feel the sounds working harder, travelling farther to be heard until the final track, a remix of “Frozen Memory”, which is so spaced out, its feeling of gradual disappearance eve- present, but due to the distance, becoming more abstract, stretching the sounds further, its stability lessening until its gradual dissipation, leaving us more than a little bereft.
-Mr Olivetti-
