Medhelan's "Nocturnal Wanderings" Offers a Solitary Trip To The Space Between Worlds
“What we can see is just a small part of reality... there's a whole invisible world existing along with our 'real' world, and there are places where the fine line between them becomes blurred until it dissolves.”
I am not a musician and, as such, the ability of sound and arrangement to move a listener and tell a story without words or images astounds me. It’s a special kind of magic, especially in the ambient genre where sounds are strung together, layered just so, to evoke and elicit memory and emotion. Lighten Up Sounds, a Minneapolis based label specializing in ambient and experimental aural art has put together a first-rate collection that weaves just the kind of spell I’m talking about. Nocturnal Wanderings is a two-part collection from Italian artist Medhelan, newly released on digital, cassette, and CD. This offering combines a 2009 release, the titular Nocturnal Wanderings, remastered in 2015 and now packaged with a companion piece called Eternal Wanderings. This four-track assemblage explores the “boundaries of invisible worlds and the blended lines between.” Let’s take a look at the course that these tracks plot through unseen spaces.
The album opens with “Crossing the Path to the River, Through the Woods Under Shooting Stars”, which begins as an urgent trek into the wild darkness of these soundscapes. It’s like staggering into the cold, damp night with no true destination. Deep, ominous undertones and goading synth flares push you onward. Mysterious, reverb-heavy melodies rise from the darkness and haunt our journey. “Nocturnal” is not an understatement here. This is music made for the night, made for the blurry, lonesome time when everyone else is asleep. Track two, “Discovering An Ancient and Forgotten Portal to the Otherworld” is true soundscape territory. A brighter song, but no less mystifying and strange, that features field recorded birdsong prominently. It places the listener in an isolated wilderness where the only option is to press onward into the titular “Otherworld” as the sounds take a sudden and upsetting detour into cacophony at the end. The second half of this collection opens with “Soaring Above the Ashes of Crumbling Towers”. This is an ethereal and moving piece that does indeed soar with it’s warm, comforting pads. Minimalist percussion keeps an even pacing to our journey while new-age sensibilities give a hopeful sheen to this track. Our closing track, entitled “Drifting Away From Smouldering Ruins, Towards Shores of Oblivion”, rounds off our journey with a bittersweet and wondrous affair of rising choir pads and resounding synths, like the sun breaking through clouds. Utterly beautiful.
This is a monumental piece of ambient music, especially when taken as a whole. I can’t reiterate enough just how haunting and stalking the melodies on the first half of this album are. They follow you in an unsettling way, feeling friendly and welcome at first as they appear amidst the more menacing sonic elements but growing bizarre and alien in their repetition. The way the birdsong on track two becomes distorted, rising subtly into a totally alien tone, is masterful. The journey that this collection takes is brilliant in its narrative capacity. A pure emotional journey into the night and beyond. A collection of sounds about loneliness, escape, and perhaps death. The interplay of dark ambient and new age minimalism works perfectly and Lighten Up Sounds’ presentation in this archival edition truly does the piece justice. I can’t recommend this enough.
This gets 9/10 on the madness meter.
If you’re quick you can still snag one of the last cassette or CD copies available from the label. Be sure to check out the other works that Medhelan has to offer on their Bandcamp page.
Lighten Up Sounds: https://lightenupsounds.com/
Medhelan: https://medhelan.bandcamp.com/