Ekzon :: Ambient Series Volume 2 (Self Released)

In a world increasingly obsessed with acceleration, Ekzon offers something altogether more radical—the opportunity to pause, listen, and feel the architecture of the moment dissolve gently into light.

Spaces you can inhabit rather than simply observe

 

Ekzon maintains his high-calibre, sophisticated corner of sound and rhythmic creation with the stunning self-released Ambient Series Volume 2. Throughout my experience of ambient music’s more spacious possibilities, I have remained resolutely attached to the seminal 76:14 by Global Communication: another timestamp, and one of the first truly compelling ambient albums to emerge in the wake of The Orb‘s The Orb’s Adventures Beyond the Ultraworld, itself part of a lineage stretching back to Brian Eno‘s earliest explorations of spatial, aural atmosphere in Music for AIrports—these that became the seed of decades of an entire genre and beyond.

This history lends some sense of the gravitas from which Ekzon operates—and perhaps unknowingly continues—in his own experiments with atmosphere as the leading texture. Already a deft hand at next-level rhythmic, programmatic glitch and electro-adjacent finery, this second collection extends those ideas across twelve tender pieces articulating contemporary urban life—not as a cold technological landscape, but as something lived within, felt through and quietly transformed by human presence.

“Throughout all 12 pieces, multi-timbral pads drift through peaks and troughs of rhythmic puncture and oceanic blooms of turquoise transcendence.” ~Will Dawkins

Titles and temperatures such as “Inertial Dream,” “A Quiet Ascent,” “Fading Echoes” and “City Lights” frame a subjective, phenomenological view of contemporary advancement, while the immediately captivating “Machines, Men, and Nature” feels almost like a small manifesto: a reconciliation of the organic and synthetic, the constructed and the instinctive. There is a generosity here, a willingness to let sound breathe rather than constantly announce itself.

Throughout all 12 pieces, multi-timbral pads drift through peaks and troughs of rhythmic puncture and oceanic blooms of turquoise transcendence. Figurative angels seem to circle somewhere within the mix, gently worrying at the heartstrings without ever slipping into sentimentality. At times there are beats to grasp and solidify; at others, only clear air, the scent of magnolia, and beautiful collisions of earnest intention. The feeling of pragmatic melancholy that endures after the almost static movement in the exquisite “Twilight Water” is a not to be missed experience. Just stunning. Closing titles duties goes to the sublime “Crystallised” a breathtaking pulse of warm fogged out bliss in motion.

Finally, for me, what makes Ambient Series V2 especially compelling, and adjacent to the aforementioned classics is its sense of unremitting balance, its relationship to its desire to be expressed. Ekzon understands that atmosphere need not mean inertia, and that sophistication need not sacrifice its correlation to necessary warmth. These tracks are spaces you can inhabit rather than simply observe: quietly detailed, emotionally open and touched by a rare sense of profound possibility. In a world increasingly obsessed with acceleration, Ekzon offers something altogether more radical—the opportunity to pause, listen, and feel the architecture of the moment dissolve gently into light.

Ambient Series Volume 2 is available on Bandcamp. [ekzon.fr]