Nils Quak :: Long Forgotten Days Under a Dust Covered Sky (Nomadic Kids Republic)

Nils Quak reflects on the tissue that separates one moment from the next, one opportunity from the next.

Field recording and ambient music as two sides of the same, very thin coin. Nils Quak has dabbled in the void before but never with such stripped-down, disquieting results. His nature is not babbling brooks and twittering birds, neither storm winds or foreboding thunder, but a less explicit, more severe kind, abstract, indiscriminate and resistant to pathos or metaphor.

On Long Forgotten Days Under a Dust Covered Sky, Quak reflects on the tissue that separates one moment from the next, one opportunity from the next—”How Soon the Day Ended,” “People Don´t Live Here Anymore,” “I’ve Watched You From a Distance”—and how easily they turn and disappear. Foetal melodies are pretty but futile, the fate of the individual irrelevant.

The dissociative piano on the miniature “November, My Dear” perfectly captures the inward turn that month provokes in most of us and establishes the right frame of mind for the following, slightly alienating backward blip flips of “I’ve Spent a Lifetime Waiting” and cold, harsh draught of “Stellar.” The last track, “To Feel Nothing,” rumbles dissonantly to a conclusion without the slightest thought to the children playing nearby.

Long Forgotten Days Under a Dust Covered Sky is available on Nomadic Kids Republic. [Release page]