When everything seems to be crashing down around you in the most violent and tumultuous nature possible, pretty much like all of 2016, the best response, for some, is to be completely enveloped in ambient tranquility. The release of Daniel Klag’s album, Devotional, could not come at a better time, advocating a slowed-down, sober approach to life’s trials and tribulations. Though certainly not conceived specifically for the particularly turbulent climate of this past year, Klag’s music is a constant, and ever-important reminder to stop breathe, and think.
The album’s lead single, “Inmost Light,” is a sonic mediation, its molasses-like oscillations and rolling crescendos creating its own, self-sustaining pulse and breath. Through some weird osmosis, the track enters your psyche and becomes a part of you, like a parasitic being that gives, rather than reaps, the benefits of its host. The tones meld into and out of one another, aggrandizing with every ebb and flow, the sedative nature of the track only insisting itself upon you more as it progresses. Usually, you (I) might say it’s as though you’re floating through the sounds, but, in this case, the sounds float through you, veins and muscles and bones becoming anti-gravity chambers in which these vibrations resonate.
Devotional is due out in the next two weeks on Patient Sounds.
