Kansas City-based artist Collin Thomas unveils a spacious, haunting sound throughout the new album The Gauze Eyed Gaze Of Bracketed Air. The enjoyably left-field ambient release features 16 pieces, at precisely 16 minutes each — centering thematically around the topic of caring for someone with dementia.
“Though many elements had chosen parameters, the resulting amalgamation was decided randomly,” Thomas explains. “This is, at its core, what it is like to know and love someone with dementia. Repetition. Surprise. Repetition. Shock. Repetition. Fatigue. Endless repetition.”
Spanning over four hours, the album’s runtime certainly seems daunting — though is well worth the exploration; the listening experience is filled with emotion and melodic beauty, propelled by lush piano, textural foreboding, and twinkling intrigue. Opening track “Early Onset” is apt in its delivery of the disease’s early stages, marked by segments of beautiful piano that’s punctuated by an unsettling percussive clanking — hinting at the incoming disruption that plagues crisp memories.
“The Wrong Banquet” incorporates those gentle piano lines, though with a more off-kilter tonal range and prominent creaking; its comparison to the opening tracks shows further development in the simmering additional elements, here joined by guitar trickling as the layers intertwine. The piano feels like more of a background component on “Just Lunch,” where the clanking aspects feel upfront relative to the lusher elegance. The Gauze Eyed Gaze Of Bracketed Air is an accomplished release that deftly handles a sensitive topic with audible artfulness.
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“Early Onset” and other tracks featured this month can be streamed on the updating Obscure Sound’s ‘Obscure Ambient’ Spotify playlist.
We discovered this release via MusoSoup, as part of the artist’s promotional campaign.
