Review: Cape Town ambient producer Jason van Wyk pares his sound down to its barest, most expressive elements, doing sound justice to the name Inherent (though he's always interested in ideas of transparency and simplicity, with the similarly themed Opacity dropping on Home Normal in 2017). He now leans into stillness in motion, folding ghost-traced piano lines and gauzy drones into long, slow exhalations, where just when things threaten to dissolve entirely, he rejigs the frame. Brittle guitars now creak in, synth arps flicker like faulty neon, rhythms emerge with princely precision. It's not a departure so much as a consolidation, as van Wyk revisits old tools with rewed restraint, preferring unembellished ambiences. Like the innate returns of close reading, we're invited to closely listen here, since glints of detail glister just below the surface.
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