French music maker, Gabriel Hernandez, offers this engaging ambient album, made almost entirely from digitally-manipulated instruments and field recordings.

The opening Derrière is a beautifully realised piece, with glistening piano tones washed by a suffocating wall of atmosphere – sounds like rain. This is superb music to relax to when doing menial tasks, carrying its own evocative remorsefulness. Likewise, Calme, which sounds like someone treading on mushy leaves, the Parisian accordion places you.

Près de L’arbre introduces gentle acoustic guitar, courtesy of Albert Fadi, again, simplicity is the key – every straining string is laid bare, whilst the track eventually mutates into a trembling, spidery mass of plucked guitars that smother the ghostly background tones.

Long, lointain toys with parallel electro-acoustic ambiences from start to finish, drawing the listener in with the sampled sounds of children’s laughter, toys, spattering water and nervous breathes, given a sense of perspective by pastoral organ passages, key tones and further guitar, all enveloped in speckled, obscure atmospheres.

Avant-garde albums built on a premise of field recordings often tread a delicate line between pretentiousness and soporific boredom, but Hernandez gets it pretty much spot on. Long, lontain follows you everywhere, digging into your dormant emotions, intimately prodding and poking at the senses, and all the while filtering your chattering mind to put you at one with a natural existence.
Four VERY short videos add further fuel to the imagination.