Sebby Kowal - Details

 Released: April 24

In their follow up to last year’s Large Air, Sebby Kowal takes us on a trip through small and sometimes  interconnected sounds of the normal experience of life. Details is technically an ambient album, but it quite often veers into a dynamic form of lowercase music with its amplified and processed treatments of everyday sonic textures. A gentle breeze becomes a whooshing drone and warm vinyl crackle becomes a bed of soft static. What particularly stands out is the treatment of rain throughout the album. Each treatment is different on each track and ranges from gentle patters to a more upfront sound. “Surface” feature one of my favorites in which the sound is ever so slightly dampened and muffled, creating a tepid texture that feels mild and warm. The distant pulsing of bass tones in the background adds to this warmth as a further menagerie of small sounds coalesce around it. “High Rise” takes a similar treatment of rain but brings it closer to the listener, making a wide ambience that serves as the kind of ether that the other atmospheric sounds peek through and around. The crickets, the birds, the bugs; it feels so all-encompassing and enveloping as the soft drones of gentle synths make everything more robust and full. 

There’s also a pattern of using some rather dub-adjacent sounding synths, notably on the first track of the album “Details.” Among all of the gentle hisses and bubbling water sounds, there’s a motif that keeps repeating in the synths. This long delay on a particular synth that give the impression of guitars echoing around a bass line which also feels kind dub-influenced. This pops back up throughout the first half of the album like on “Good For Me” and the aforementioned “Surface/“ Much of this falls away in the latter half of the album as it transitions to a more ambient and drone approach. It makes for an interesting procession as it feels like the music is slowly being absorbed by the small details that first served as more muted accoutrements. They slowly become the entire focus, morphing the motifs from deep and mysterious to more atmospheric and abstracted. It comes to a full fruition with the final track “Japanese Lanterns,” which eschews the previous dub notes in favor of a gentle yet noisy soundscape.