A live improvisation and sonic experiment, featuring warm, hazy and frayed guitar-based ambient textures and loops that evolve in space and time. The feeling suggests imaginary perceptions, perceptual distortions and fantasy-like perceptions of the universe we traverse, an incomplete journey through time that sets one forever adrift, through places that will remain after us, and where we are not.
An enduring and beautifully surreal ambient drift
People have used music or sacred sound to calm their spirits for thousands of years. THRESHOLD could be film music for an imaginary film exploring the territory between presence and absence, suggesting fleeting and ever-changing constituents of experience, exploring emotion through textures, colors, harmonies and static, reverberating in liminal spaces where dusk becomes night, with a fragile hope of finding light. The emotional content is neutral, not happy or gloomy, and sometimes slow and restful, other times more energizing. Each track exercises the drone concept, long sustained textures that have slightly shifting variations in the enduring extended mode.
THRESHOLD consists of 9 tracks, which flow into an enduring and beautifully surreal ambient drift. Each track would be crossing over as a live improvisation and sonic experiment, featuring warm, hazy and frayed guitar-based ambient textures and loops that evolve in space and time. I can experience vivid, ethereal out-of-body experiences while listening to these drones, thick atmospheres from one big chord or long note with slowly changing parts. The sound is eternal, like a waterfall we approach it and take it in, linger longer, and then move along, with travelling clairvoyance the music never stops. Now if you need something to sit still and drift in and out, this is perfect, some listeners will probably want more kinetics.
All tracks were recorded between July 2025 and September 2026, each as a live improvisation and sonic experiment, featuring warm, hazy and frayed guitar-based ambient textures and loops that evolve in space and time. The feeling suggests imaginary perceptions, perceptual distortions and fantasy-like perceptions of the universe we traverse, an incomplete journey through time that sets one forever adrift, through places that will remain after us, and where we are not.
Rising from the void, THRESHOLD opens into drone elements, electric guitar layers and gentle clouds of triumphant atmospheric wakefulness, a meditation on timeless time. “Awakening” (8:49) here, something is starting, what is it? Things turn a bit darker, you’re going away so I am sad. “Departure” (6:22) brings chimes and shadows, this is not about weeping but it is quietly somber, gentle clouds of gloomy guitar chords, slow and dismal, forming endless slow motion dronescapes. Now for the title track, “Threshold” (8:44), and the energy is building, the brightness increases, time to rise up into the dazzling white wall of light. Now consider the transition ahead, we are going all the way through to another place, the whole thing is very slow. Perhaps we are crossing over from the darkness into the light, it probably always takes a long time.
Gathering the light, starting at the edge and moving into the center, midway I hear strange motions, sounds emerge that are irregular, unknown rumblings visit and hide, “Sunshower” (5:03), features long slow sustained glitchy-sunny tones, shimmering hums expanding in the glow. Later something comes along and swims next to us for a while. “Drift” (4:58) starts with jittery tones up high, with something in the middle that is slower, always moving and always changing just a little bit, nothing happens. This may be just one long nervous tone with slight variations that seem to wander throughout the new universe.
Shimmers are playing across accidental rainbows ::
I was expecting an amoeba orchestra performing a cover of a Pink Floyd song, and of course I was wrong again. “Time” (4:47) serves up some primitive pulsing throbbing cosmic noodles, in a background sauce of inky infinity with pools of sparkling light. There is considerable energy pulsing nearby, but here the feeling is almost breezy. Actually, the whole thing is getting brighter and stronger very slowly, continuing into the next track, “Whiteout” (6:11) where a very slow hum gets brighter, then something new ascends, like a sunny day after a big snow, the light is spectacularly intense. I hear one long sustained tone of tidy white brilliance. “Afterward” (3:45) seems more restless, the shimmers are playing across accidental rainbows, getting more detailed as once again forever, the intensity slowly builds.
The last track begins quietly, with some slight hissing, imagine a breeze or some water spray, the sounds fade in slowly, “(A)drift” (9:09) and then before coming into full focus, the fade out begins. The feeling is relief and bliss, happening slowly carefully delicately playing on the edge of hearing. The upper world is the abode of benevolent spirits and heavenly scenes, while the underworld consists of ancestral and malignant spirits as well as dark and gloomy places. So much drone exposure gave me a sense of clear, stable awareness and the distinct feeling of perceiving from outside the physical body, often perceiving the world from an elevated or distant vantage point. Is this what the future will bring?
VOLNA would be Andrey Fedoseev, an independent musician based in Sydney, Australia. The album has been mastered by Taylor Deupree from 12k Mastering and sits in a similar emotional and textural territory to much of the music he has worked on, including artists like Hammock, Helios, Alex Somers, Warmth and others. Andrey has been making experimental music as VOLNA since 2016, and released the debut post-rock EP DRMWLKR in 2019.
THRESHOLD is available on Bandcamp.
