Passage

2017’s shoegaze-inspired electronic music collaboration from the synths of Schnauss and the guitar of Munk was their second album together, and although it stays largely in the same musical, stylistic and mood area as the first — blissful, introspective, sleepy, dreamy — it’s a little more varied in tone and style from track to track. Album opener “Amaris” is a kind of surf guitar/Balearic hybrid, “Genau Wie Damals” melds new age and neo-classical, “Intervention Sol” is pure beatless shoegaze, while “Spellbreaker” hints at the pomp and circumstance of ’80s new romantic. Passage has perhaps a few less ecstatic highs than their first joint album and is more inward-looking, revelling in the simple pleasures of a quietly evolving sequenced synth line and the palatial sonic richness they produce from their interweaving stacks of synths and guitar parts. Serene, beatific synthgaze.