Selfish Limbs - Lefka Ori

Released: January 31

Bringing us his first album of 2025, Greek producer Selfish Limbs takes us on a journey through the mountains of the Lefki Ori range, exploring fourteen peaks. each track is named after one of these peaks along with the elevation of that peak. It’s hard to say how much each track is representative of its titular peak, but the album as a whole captures the cold, craggy, and rock landscape to haunting effect. It has a cold and airy tone overall but there is also a certain mystical quality that pops up throughout as well. I could hear this very clearly on the third track, “Troharis 2401m.” It’s overall very wide and spacious with in credible reverberant qualities. But then we also hear these wonderful little tingles of sound that feel like droplets of sunshine-inflected rain sprinkling on us as we look out over the valleys, ridges, and spurs below. 

Some of the tracks lean purely into the more ambient side of things, like “Thodori Korti 2371m.” There’s much less to catch you so abruptly here, instead creating a large and swirling atmosphere of synths sounds that go from deep and subtle rumbles to shiny and bright pads. Much of the album centers itself around this particular motif and it works extremely well with its subject matter. It’s something about the long and drawn out sounds that creates something hypnotic and surreal, but not so surreal that it detracts from the real life mountainous world that this album is based on. I can imagine this is a bit what it would feel like to reach the top of a majestic mountain after hiking for several hours while microdosing  psychedelics. 

Selfish Limbs also utilizes a bit of lo-fi aesthetics at various parts of the album, particularly on one of my favorite tracks, “Svourixti 2356m.” This one in particular resonated with me with its warbly tones and pacing. It stays quite ambient and minimal for most of the time, but it has this feeling like it is racing down a at certain points. The synths suddenly coalesce around each other to create this temporary runaway cascade of gentle lo-fi noise every so often in the song. It’s a fantastic effect that injects a strange aesthetic in to the already rich sonic tapestry that is this album.