Tracklist
1 | In-Between | |
2 | You Are Made of Light | |
3 | Passage | |
4 | Don't Worry, We Will Vanish Soon | |
5 | Far Away from the Dawn | |
6 | Prism | |
7 | Till It All Falls Down | |
8 | Rising Tide | |
9 | Untold | |
10 | The Man Who Lived in the Mirror | |
11 | Broken Windows, Shimmering Waves |
Radiant, diaphanous ambient scapes from Tehran-raised, Berlin-based Arash Akbari, debuting with Karlrecords after early appearances with Opal Tapes/Zabte Sote and Kate Carr’s Flaming Pines
Steering wide of Karlrecords’ noisier, atonal, avant tastes, ‘Fragments of Yearning’ yields nearly an hour of effortless, harmonic consonance for sound bathing in your chosen listening space. The styles are very much in proximity of Kompakt’s Pop Ambient series (Gas, Simon Scott) and also with a washed out nostalgic appeal comparable to Leyland Kirby’s widescreen cinematics, effectively tapping into a tangible sense of sehnsucht that resonates with the album’s title, or does so to our ears, at least.
Together with the evocative track titles, the pull of nostalgia or home sickness is palpable and apparent from start to finish, but sensitively so, tending to gauzily contemplative, melancholic gestures rather than anything weepy, and leaving plenty of room for interpretation. In a most classic ambient sense it occupies that space between the background and foreground, preferring to suggestively evoke rather than force the emotion. But where that can all too often fall into wishy washy whimsy, there’s something beautifully rarified, eternally timeless about Akbar’s work that says it without saying it and humbly takes us there with minimal fuss or spectacle.