There’s a saying in German: Augen sind der Spiegel der Seele — the eyes are the mirror of the soul. I’ve always found this line more unsettling than comforting. It implies a transparency we rarely allow ourselves. Eyes don’t lie. They reflect what’s inside, even when words fail. But what if that inside remains shapeless, a moving field of signals and impressions, defying stable contours?
My new ambient piece “Inside” doesn’t tell a story, and it doesn’t present anything that wants to be decoded. It refuses the safety net of melody. Instead, it moves — or perhaps stays — in a space where perception dissolves into suggestion. The piece is about what looks back at us, silently, from behind the eyes. What flickers there, beneath the surface tension of gaze.
Rather than sculpting recognisable motifs, I worked with layered atmospheres, incidental textures, and extended tonal fields that behave more like temperature than tone. There are no melodies in the traditional sense. Nothing unfolds. Nothing repeats. The structure rests on microshifts — subtle glides between inner states that never quite settle. I was interested in resonance, not as a musical interval, but as an impression left in the body after contact. A psychological afterimage.
The sound palette is reduced. Some elements resemble room tone, some resemble breath. Occasionally, something like proximity becomes audible — a presence, not a voice. These are not metaphors. They are sensory events without explanation. The sounds are not ornamental. They’re not added. They’re not describing anything. They just remain, like the trace of a thought one can’t remember forming.
When composing “Inside”, I imagined the auditory equivalent of staring at someone’s eyes for too long — long enough that recognition fades and something else appears: a neutral but absolute presence. Not emotion, not narrative, just something unfiltered and irreducible. The kind of presence that refuses to be performed.
I wanted to create a sonic surface that listens back. A field where attention becomes fragile. This is not ambient in the decorative sense. It doesn’t accompany. It doesn’t offer comfort. But it holds space — for whatever shows up, when the listener stops trying to find something.
There are no peaks. No harmonic arrival. If there’s tension, it’s the tension of observation: of being with something without naming it.
Some listeners might feel “Inside” as distance. Others might experience it as almost too close. Like being confronted with one’s own gaze. There’s a paradox here: the further we remove the surface codes of musical expression — the things that tell us how to feel — the more immediate the encounter can become. Not because it says something more true, but because it says nothing at all.
“Inside” lasts nine minutes. But it doesn’t develop in time. It sits, stretches, breathes, and evaporates. I didn’t intend it to end, but I had to stop recording at some point. The piece doesn’t conclude. It simply stops being audible.
To me, “Inside” is a room without light. Not dark in a dramatic sense. Just absent of signal. But if you stay there long enough, the eye adjusts. And maybe, just maybe, something starts looking back.
Release date of “Inside” is August 6, 2025.
