“There’s so much to unpack listening to Ostel’s latest album, with so much thoughtfulness and confident artistry put into it.”
Ambient, neo-classical, drone, and experimental artist Ostel deals with his tribulations earnestly and authentically. harmonically and dramatically. In his album released this year – ‘we lock our dark halves deep in the basement of our souls but darkness’ – each track is beautifully articulated.
First melody ‘dandelion’, a collaboration with Composer and pianist Edoardo Gastaldi, melodises the feeling of walking through a breezy night in the cold. The instrumental is raw and sentimental in nature, as moments of hope linger around the pensiveness. ‘everything fades’ continues the album with a similar sound. The pitch is lower, but the emotional effect and meteorological imagery remains. The title has connotations of loss, moreover despair, and these concepts can be purely interpreted from the instrumental.
The music video for ‘lounge chat with my inner demons’ captures feelings of uncertainty as a child wonders around a garden hesitantly, feelings of solitude as a man stares outside from his mid-century kitchen. It captures unity as a seemingly perpetual group of birds flock together and fly into the distance, and it captures anger as the man starts hitting the wheel of his car, then defeat as he gradually pulls away. All the while, a versatile instrumental plays into each scene and emotion.
“I wrote this album in the most complex and dark period of my life so far, a lot of things happening around me and turning my life upside down,” stated Ostel, “In the midst of impermanence and uncertainty, I had to reboot myself physically and mentally. My brain burned to the ashes and I had to slowly rebuild it up again somehow. It was sobering to realize how fragile I was and how it was a whole physical thing triggered by real things and mental things.”
‘Disintegration’, a collaboration with project of Alba GP NOC NOC, unravels a chilling sound in the midst of its slow pace. Faint vocals can be heard, carving somewhat of an echoing effect, which leads us coincidingly into ‘echoes in my head’. This melody opens grandly with violin strings, before simmering down instrumentally. Eventually this becomes a unique pattern, until the violin fades out and a mellow sound guides us out.
The ruminative ‘a judgement from the past’, suggested in its title, explores pitch fascinatingly. A lower pitch welcomes us, building up to the impressively high pitch showcased as the melody progresses. Instrumentally it’s aligned with nature, so fresh and serene despite tribulations. Title track ‘We lock our dark halves deep in the basement of our souls but darkness always finds a way of seeping through the cracks’ has, on the surface, a more consistent pitch and overall sound. It may take a few listens to grasp the gradual shifts Ostel skilfully orchestrates in order to reach the elevated beat, faster pace and electrifying tension at the end.
We can hear a piano being played in the distance on final song ‘deliverance’, which is fitting with our role as the audience, as if we are watching as well as hearing Ostel display his talent. The instrumental then becomes harsher as the piano notes linger in the soundscape. And as the melody comes to a close, a cohesion is found.
You can listen to we lock our dark halves deep in the basement of our souls but darkness always finds a way of seeping through the cracks here: