Unstern is a collaboration between ambient artist Arzat Skia, and pianist Leo Svirsky. Together they’ve produced an album of deep drones and delicate keys. A symphonic and cinematic set / suite of 5 compositions, of sometimes breathtaking beauty, whose stillness generates, and encourages you to navigate, internal narratives. Of Fire And The Many-Eyed Wheels, for example, is a densely textured soundscape that begins like a storm brewing on the horizon, travelling toward you with a muted power. As its keys become clearer the drama, threat of danger, subsiding into calm. Malign Star starts with a shimmering cicada like buzz. The treated insect song sampled from the Peruvian amazon. In the Roar of Your Channels is a sheer sonic sheet. A scintillating wall of static with dancing distorted edges. A microscopically moving state of flux that harbours almost human harmonies.

The album’s title track, Es Geht der Tag zur Neige, which translates as “The Day Is Drawing To a Close”, opens as a distant thumping, again, like far away thunder. The darkest piece on offer, Svirsky’s playing, rinsed in reverb, emerges from sinister strings and eerie groans like some unsettling, Satie / Gnossienne No. 1-esque score for some unseen horror. This is balanced by the positivity of All the Kingdoms of the World In a Moment Of Time which carries a sense of trials, challenges, tests of strength and resolve. The mood, once more, changing as its piano becomes more prominent. Its melodic theme rising and falling, repeating. Introducing an undercurrent of peace, a feeling of resolution and possible redemption.

Unstern  Es Geht der Tag zur Neige can be pre-ordered from Alter.