Re:member

Released

The overall mood of this instrumental album from Icelandic composer producer and multi-instrumentalist Ólafur Arnalds is one of welcoming musical familiarity combined with a quiet and restrained tranquillity. Created using his Stratus software which generates additional notes on two self-playing semi-generative player pianos, it’s an album that cleverly and seamlessly blends the synthetic and organic. re:member is made up of emotive piano lines, the prettiest of string figures, and fragile cascades of reverb, coloured by delicately pulsing synths, drones and chord washes, and with occasional ticking electronic drum loops. Some tracks are still, seeming to exist in a constant present moment rather than progressing, others take a simple musical idea and gently construct a swelling expanse of emotive sound around it. A rarefied, delicate and beautiful listen.

Harold Heath

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