It’s a bit daft to repeatedly compare instrumental music with an ambient bent to soundtracks for movies that have never been made. With Aural Stream, though, it’s appropriate, and inescapable. Few production outfits are able to make music so visionary, imaginative and virtually pressing up against the medium to push its creatures of the mind into the real world.
How To Disappear Completely is a live ambient collective based in Poland and their latest EP was reputedly burned live in October 2021 and April 2022 to 2 inch tape. If that’s what provides that warm, enveloping sound, I hope they have an endless supply of it. Other than the first track “Dawn Breaks Through (Iterum),” HTDC resist the urge to loop these beautiful sounds into epic scale tracks — most of these are under six minutes, one under four. As much as I love a big, sloppy opus, these work: repetition plays out but never taxes your patience. These songs slip silently into the back of your consciousness and then to the forefront again. The sound is almost painstakingly perfect — Aural Stream is likely the most well-produced ambient album I’ve heard in 2022.
HTDC’s tracks are made for looping, that’s inescapable, but feel like they’re chunks broken from one piece. Play them together, in sequence, because the leitmotivs and repeating themes are telling a story.
How To Disappear Completely: Aural Stream
1. How To Disappear Completely: Dawn Breaks Through (Iterum) (10:46)
2. How To Disappear Completely: Lux Vivens (05:14)
3. How To Disappear Completely: Memoria (07:11)
4. How To Disappear Completely: Motionless Constant (05:28)
5. How To Disappear Completely: A Hidden Moment (03:51)
Disclosure Statement: This record was not submitted as a promo.