REVIEW: Music For Sleep – Music From A Sinking World (2021)

Under the moniker Music For Sleep, artist Andrea Porcu’s 2021 release Music From A Sinking World is a beautiful and haunting work of melancholic tape loop ambience. Across seven vignettes or ‘short trajectories’ as music writer Peppe Trotta described it, Music From A Sinking World is like standing still in a cold marble gallery of a bombed out museum. The pieces themselves are distinctive and worthy of individual attention, yet contribute to the collective works’ melancholic and haunting potency.

The record is beautiful and haunting and everything else one could wish for in a masterful Ambient album. Originally recorded from March to October of 2020 and later recovered, each song on Music From A Sinking World takes a singular motif from an orchestral recording and amplifies subtle emotional qualities through a thick blanket of melancholia.

Acting like wind erosion on the listener’s perception of time, the work of Andrea Porcu feels at the behest of some greater current of the universe. Muddled melancholic loops spin like Ouroboros, bleeding out as reverb across any definitive point in the cycle. Andrea Porcu’s sculpting of tone and texture are beautiful, but it is the subversion of the listener’s perception of time, drenched in melancholy, which is the greatest takeaway of Music From A Sinking World.

Music is an art of movement, and so our perception of it is through the lens of time. How fitting is then that its end always sneaks up on the individual?

I really enjoyed Peppe Trotta’s description of this album, which is why I felt a need to quote them. “Brevi traiettorie” is just such a great way to describe the individual songs on Music From A Sinking World, so please go check out their review of the album on SoWhat Musica.

For fans of: Caretaker, William Basinski, Susumu Yokota

Like Music For Sleep? Give these a listen: Slow Blink, Brian J Davis, Robert Chamberlain