Ambient music is often slow by nature: forms unfold in deep time, themes of delay and gradual decay are foregrounded, drones are frequently prominent. Immersion is achieved through limiting movement, stretching out melodies until they are barely recognisable as melodies, holding back from the temptation to change a note or spark up a new tempo. Sam Beste, AKA The Vernon Spring, doesn’t quite adhere to these tenets. His music is definitely immersive and mostly soothing, but it is also unusually fleet-footed, full of flourish and unexpected growth, something like watching those time-lapse videos of flowers blooming. Since his gorgeous and melancholic 2021 debut, A Plane Over Woods, he has embraced a kind of gentle quickness: piano melodies wander, explore and sometimes skitter over ambiguous electro-acoustic backdrops. Vocals are used sparingly, the human voice treated like any other instrument. The mood flits between bucolic and emotionally fraught.
His new album, Under a Familiar Sun, sees Beste further refine his unique sound. It is still ambient in spirit, but technically sits somewhere between new age, neoclassical, jazz and a kind of pastoral electronica. Opener Norton features chopped beats, warped voices and field recordings, drawing deeply from the well of experimental hip-hop, while the jazzy piano chases its tail over the top. The songs sometimes feel like pretty little puzzles, loaded with meaning and waiting to be unpicked. Sometimes the target is more obvious: The Breadline features a spoken word part by author Max Porter, which takes aim at inequality and proposes a new, empathy-driven way of living. More often, there are depths of ambiguity and mystery, and songs like Mustafa (with Iko Niche) have a deliberately disjointed, cut-up feel which only adds to their appeal.
Other Tongues has a dreamlike quality, the vocals cascading mistily, mingling with the piano’s music-box melody before being interrupted by disquieting electronics. The impression of falling or bubbling liquid is reinforced in the near-instrumental title track, an impressionistic rush of lithe piano notes. One argument for categorising Beste’s work as ambient is his penchant for running many of his (usually short) pieces together, creating a kind of shifting framework whose details are constantly in flux but linked by an overarching theme. So when gaps between songs do appear, they act as waymarkers pointing out changes in direction. This is the case when the title track ends and the open-ended swoosh and jag of Fume begins, or when the featherlight In the Middle brings the first half of the album to a close. These subtle directional shifts have the feel of fluctuating breezes, slight but always noticeable.
Side two begins with Fitz, where a soft piano traces tranquil shapes over swathes of electronics. Then we are treated to two consecutive songs featuring the experimental soul of New York-based vocalist aden. The first, Esrever Ni Rehtaf, is a gentle but cryptic meditation on fatherhood. Stretched out to seven minutes, it is by far the longest track on the album, full of interlocking segments, backwards vocals, the sounds of children playing. It marks the point in the album when the general but widely dispersed sense of hope is crystalised into something tangible. Counted Strings, the other aden track, focuses this sense of hope through chiming, repeated piano notes and a foregrounded vocal.
The two final tracks have a more elegiac air. The melancholic piano of Requiem for Reem has a dusty, indefinable quality of distance and age, while Known feels like a piano étude spliced with a meditative new age mantra, and ends in deliberate decay. It’s perfectly formed and perfectly concluded, a microcosm of all of The Vernon Spring’s work. Under a Familiar Sun is the most immediately rewarding exercise in ambience you’re ever likely to hear, but it contains ideas and melodies, vague sensations and politically driven statements, that will stay with you long after the last notes fade away.
Under a Familiar Sun (May 9th, 2025) via RVNG Intl., OPIA, and Inpartmaint.
Order: https://lnk.to/rvngnl123
