Review: Billow Observatory returns to the fully ambient realms of their 2012 debut with a deeply introspective, percussion-free release that drifts through spectral soundscapes. Created by Jason Kolb and Jonas Munk, the duo's transatlantic collaboration has matured across four full-length albums marked by precision and emotional depth. Here, abandoning traditional structure, the album instead looks to harness the power of chance and randomness with shimmering guitar textures that crackle and dissolve like dust in water. It evokes a world slightly out of sync that is brooding, haunting and beautifully immersive while underlining their place as masters of refined, atmospheric ambient music.
Review: The result of two creative brains formerly engrossed in other projects (Jonas Munk and Jason Kolb), Billow Observatory is a project fitted for every epic classicist and spaced-out dreamer - two categories of music listener we're always happy to cater to. Loosely touching on themes of rapture, gazing and cosmic amazement, 'Stareside' is a time-upending LP that "thread the needle between hope and hopelessness", via a purging, ambient wash of sound born from twin-flame guitar feedback and soaring synths.
Review: Billow Observatory is a collaborative project from Detroit-based Jason Kolb and Denmark's Jonas Munk which explores ambient with a certain post rock sensibility. Following gracefully on from 2022's Stareside album, this new LP in fact gathers together two separate EPs from the duo and presents them as one listening experience. There's a delicacy to tracks like 'Garden of Four Streams' which speaks to Japanese environmental music, but still the projects maintains its affinity for ethereal chambers of sound as much as fragile foreground sonic figures. This is a high-grade strain of ambient with a depth of sound which will capture your attention from the very start.
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