Air Signs rests at its distinct sound. Everything is pieced together very well, and all the noises, melodies, and synths are family—they all align track after track. Deschamps has a gift for cohesion. Even when he’s working with degraded loops, reversed recordings, and heavily processed guitar, nothing feels fragmented. Everything belongs.
Dreamlike and reminiscent of ambient joy
Brad Deschamps has been quietly building one of the most consistent catalogs in contemporary ambient music. Working under the anthéne moniker, the Toronto-based musician has released extensively on Home Normal, Past Inside the Present, Whitelabrecs, and Constellation Tatsu, while also running the widely respected Polar Seas Recordings label. His collaborations with Ian Hawgood (as Rosales), Stijn Hüwels, and David Cordero have earned critical acclaim, and his solo work is known for its dusty, emotionally resonant guitar and synth-led compositions. Air Signs arrives on Dronarivm, a small independent label from the Netherlands focused on contemporary ambient, electroacoustic, and modern classical music.
Each piece here feels very dreamlike and reminiscent of ambient joy. A very easy listen. Inspired by a hawk that landed right outside the window at Deschamps‘ workplace in a hectic area of downtown Toronto, the pieces are light and airy, reflecting the stillness of our natural surroundings in the midst of human-made chaos. Dronarivm has built a strong catalog over the years, releasing work from artists like Chihei Hatakeyama, bvdub, and o[rlawren], all mastered with care and presented in limited physical editions.
“Starling” and “all a blur” are standouts here. “Starling” has such a beautiful build to it with subtle guitar noises. Deschamps processes his guitar loops with a Chase Bliss Lossy pedal and a Vongon Paragraphs filter, both creating unusual tones, overtones, and artifacts. He also makes heavy use of a Maneco 16 second delay for lo-fi forward and reversed loops. This approach to guitar processing is what sets Deschamps apart from more straightforward ambient guitarists—the loops are degraded, filtered, and stretched until they’re barely recognizable as guitar. Rather than letting the track fade out into nothing or meaninglessness, “Starling” adds meaning through a steady bassline that anchors the swells and melodies drifting above it.
Creating haunting, otherworldly textures (in reverse) ::
“All a blur” is where Deschamps uses backward recordings and noises for reversed melodies. Writing reversed melodies is a craft that’s both detailed and tricky. When you reverse a recording, the attack and decay of each note flip—what was a sharp pluck becomes a slow swell, and what was a fade becomes an abrupt cut. This means that composing in reverse requires you to think backward about how sounds will evolve. It’s not just playing something and hitting reverse; it’s imagining how the reversed version will sound and then recording the forward version in a way that creates the desired effect when flipped. Sometimes it works beautifully, creating haunting, otherworldly textures. Sometimes it doesn’t, the timing feels off, the melody doesn’t resolve the way you’d hoped, or the reversed artifacts distract from the composition. Deschamps fits this perfectly here. At its core, “all a blur” sounds nightmarish, but it really isn’t. The reversed elements create an unsettling undercurrent, but the piece never collapses into darkness. It’s tense without being oppressive.
Air Signs rests at its distinct sound. Everything is pieced together very well, and all the noises, melodies, and synths are family—they all align track after track. Deschamps has a gift for cohesion. Even when he’s working with degraded loops, reversed recordings, and heavily processed guitar, nothing feels fragmented. Everything belongs. The mastering by Peter Andersson helps too, giving the release a warm, unified sheen that ties the six tracks together. Air Signs is limited to 100 copies on factory-pressed CD, packaged in a unique discbox slider case with a soft-touch finish. For fans of guitar-based ambient and electroacoustic music, this is a strong addition to both Deschamps‘ catalog and Dronarivm‘s growing discography.
Air Signs is available on Dronarivm. [Bandcamp]
