RECESSED DRAUGHTING – Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe (2024) – Album Review

Album: RECESSED DRAUGHTING

Artist: Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe

Release Date:  June 25, 2024

It feels almost rude to use the phrase “old world” when describing something like this, but maybe I just don’t have the words to describe that feeling any other way. Ambient music has been around forever, and while electrons have given us easy access to sounds that makes us feel a certain way, there is some ambient music that feels timeless. Maybe what I’m actually feeling, is an old soul.

There are always two things I’m constantly searching for in this life – that crisp feeling of Autumn air and the comfort of music that feels like home. RECESSED DRAUGHTING by Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe feels like an old friend. It makes sense that Robert would describe this as “pastoral” and “gestural” moments, because the music really does evoke something more fundamental and foundational in me. Maybe a better way to describe is that the album embodies slowness – a kind of gradual chiral expansion that’s no doubt brewing and bubbling deep below the surface, while it only appears like slow moving lava to those far away from it. Patience and expansion.

It’s long arcs and sound stretched across your perception of reality – and it reminds me that time is probably better inhabited than measured. The pace of breath, the pace of erosion, the pace of life unfolding outside of the clock. This album is definitely disorienting to the uninitiated. The music unfolds as environments and spaces you enter without a clear map. It’s a lifeforce pulling you out of familiar patterns of listening and into something more elemental, and can be a stark reminder that your perception of your comfortable place is only as deep as you allow it to be. Comfort becomes relative, provisional.

Listen to this with an open mind and remember that in this life, nothing is truly set in stone. Fantastic album.