REVERIE
1: ETHERAL AMBIENCE
Pentatonic vibrations spread like singing bowls, fanning out and dancing around the string tones that rise as if from the depths of dark water, the hidden voice of an underwater piano. Gently struck notes feel their way forward, tiptoeing with care through the trailing currents of the strings, which glide on into infinity with an ethereal, shimmering glow.
2: MÅNGATA
Night. A cool wind blows without ceasing, and the breath of the wanderer, lit by the moon, rises in pale clouds of mist. The gaze falls upon the water, where the cold moonlight is reflected back. It does not appear there as a single point in the sky, but as a path, scattered and unfurled by the waves before our feet. In thought, the feet step onto this lunar road, which wordlessly declares that one is invited to follow.
Ever shifting, the surface of this path points straight toward the horizon – glittering, rippling, restless, and yet purposeful – though what true destination lies ahead? The thoughts are permitted to step onto the moon’s road and let themselves be guided by its light.
Cool, windswept gusts of sound weave the ground beneath this journey. The frozen breath becomes audible; its echo drifts along the moonlit path toward the horizon. The glow and shimmering reflection of the moon are evoked by a distant, almost intangible organ symphony. The travellers’ emotions, their steps led by the watery resonance of a piano, find their voice in the trembling of a cello – anxious, perhaps, and yet tinged with hope. Will there be solid ground to stand upon, something firm enough to bear their weight? And if so, it remains only for a brief moment before slipping away again, so that the travellers continue to drift forward in their thoughts, hovering onward in the hope of reaching the end of the moonlit path, where they may finally come to rest.
3: NATSUKASHII
Memory is what makes us human. It allows us to re‑enter past moments, if only in fragments, in the distilled essences that have left their traces within us. These traces lead back to what was beautiful and comforting, tenderly desired and quietly missed in the present. They flare up when sparked by a sound, a scent, a place, and they summon a gentle ache the moment awareness separates what is now from what has been. Natsukashii – a word borrowed from Japanese – gives this feeling a name.
The sound world of Natsukashii opens onto a universe shaped by many cultures, where voices from different origins sound with and beside one another. Their synergies give rise to something new: tangible, perceptible, vivid.
The journey begins with Udu drums, percussion idiophones of fired clay rooted in Nigeria. Later, quintos – small Latin American congas – join in, weaving greater rhythmic complexity, while the melody of a Chinese yangqin enters and leads the ear into landscapes of longing, rhythmically carried by the soft rush of a rainstick. Longing itself finds voice in a distant, yearning call of “E-ho” that reaches out into the far away. Thought sets a wind in motion that moves around memory; the star‑filled sky, with its glittering lights and sweeping traces, reveals the boundlessness of one’s own thoughts and invites them to be released into infinity.
4: PI (A HUNDRED DIGITS)
From the breath of numbers rises Pi — irrational, infinite, ever-present. It calls us into the paradox of knowing the unknowable, of touching what escapes every grasp.
In its wake, Pi Ambience unfolds —
a world of sound born of the impossible,
where order glimmers only to slip again into the current of chaos.
Waves of tone approach the shore sometimes whispering in translucent foam, sometimes roaring with surge and brightness thirty-eight point one nine seven times each minute, each wave carried by a secret triplet pulse, quiet yet eternal.
The air trembles around 140 hertz, a deep C-sharp breathing through vastness.
At the beginning, a great bell tolls the three whole digits of Pi, then the small bells awaken — pentatonic, crystalline — repeating Pi’s decimals as if they were ancient syllables of an endless prayer.
Digits one through four climb the scale in quick sixteenth steps, five through nine flicker in thirty-second sparkles.
And when zero arrives, the bells fall silent —
a single gong pierces the air, gravity itself vibrating in its wake.
Through this sonic cosmos, pentatonic stairways drift in mirrored flight, revealing only fragments of the 120 shapes they might become, glimmers of symmetry adrift in infinity.
After six hundred twenty-eight seconds, the journey breathes its last — not an ending, but a pause in the infinite orbit of sound, a moment when eternity folds into silence and listens back.
5: LA BALLERINE DE LA BOÎTE À MUSIQUE
A sea of flute sounds cradles a single singing flute and gives it a world in which it can play and find companions. Fed by little streams that let their water flow steadily over pebbles they sometimes carry along, or around larger stones that rise up like bridges leading to the other side. The sounds of these bridges are shaped by a stepwise dancing xylophone, as if it were joyfully hopping behind the flute through this gentle landscape, eager to dance with it.
The soft ground lets many other creatures leap back and forth and invites the two playing guests to linger among them. Into this scene, inspired by all its positivity, a young woman calls out her joy in life, standing in for all those who long for such joy and might find it here. With her arms spread wide in dance, she turns within the rays of the warming sun and whirls its light into a shining spiral, so that, from the outside, she appears like a ballerina inside a music box that has only just been opened.
6: WALDEINSAMKEIT
The Forest. Horizon, sky, earth, distance, nearness – all are redefined by the forest. The trunks of its trees thicken in the distance into an opaque yet permeable membrane. The crowns weave a roof that, now and then, lets a ray of sunlight fall onto the soft, loose ground. Forest creatures dance within these shafts of light, in quick zigzag motions, up and down, to and fro. Scents of blossom, resin, rising damp and ancient wood lend this world an enchanting atmosphere of freshness and abundance.
The forest membrane lets in hardly any sound from outside; instead it keeps its own voices within, letting them echo deeply and reverberate along its elements.
Alone in the forest, with all senses open to what appears, you feel yourself part of a greater whole: a living being among countless others, each existing in its own way, receiving, giving, and interacting with what surrounds it. You are not alone. You are here, where many roots take hold, where so much is grounded, where you can trace the meaning of your own existence. You are not lonely as something abandoned; you are wholly with yourself, attentive to this place. You savour the quiet world of sound and sense that you, too, are inwardly filled with gentle tones that vibrate and resonate. You find resonance and take the outer vibrations more and more into yourself, and give your own back. The feeling of completeness, detached from all that outside either awaits you or does not – that is Waldeinsamkeit.
7: MELANCHOLY, OR BEAUTY WITHIN
“And I also began to understand that suffering, disappointment, and melancholy do not exist to make us embittered, worthless, and without dignity, but to make us mature and to transfigure us.”
— Hermann Hesse, “Peter Camenzind”
Melancholy brings with it a kind of stillness — a stillness from the rattling and calling of the outer world. It draws the gaze inward, toward the self, toward that inner core whose own vibrations are so often drowned out by the waves striking from without.
Born of a moment that stirs sadness, melancholy leads into introspection, invites escape, and — when allowed to unfold — awakens a deep sensitivity, a piercing union between the real and the surreal. In this synthesis lies the source of creation and abstraction. Thus, within the melancholic moment dwells a quiet beauty whose discovery and comprehension lay the ground upon which true life begins.
Beginning with a single melancholic moment in minor, the gentle strokes of the piano strings lead gradually into the beauty and calm of major tones — sounds that, following their inner logic, could flow on endlessly.
Each episode, resolving with a seventh’s imperfection, ascends toward completion, closing eventually into a circle — an unbroken cycle.
Spheric echoes of voices and resonant strings, joined with a tender depth of frequencies and reverberation, symbolize the boundless expanse of the inner world — soothing, warm, and infinite.
Directing awareness outward once again, the listener finds themselves returned to the opening scene — yet now transformed by insight, and illuminated by a changed understanding.