The way we interpret ambient music has undergone many changes in recent years. Technology has made it easier, creating ambient from the bedroom has become easy, often lazy, not because of the idea of easy, but because of the realisation itself: most of today’s ambient music is more concerned with the shape of the sound than what the sound conveys (the outside, not the inside). Because ambient goes beyond the idea of “ambient sound”. It’s also a state. This is to mention the collaboration between Steve Gunn and David Moore, born out of a new RVNG Intl. series in the “Reflections” dossier. The idea, perhaps the result of the pandemic, of how we can progress and be inspired by other rhythms of life.

“Let The Moon Be a Planet” places guitarist Steve Gunn and pianist David Moore in territory that is no stranger to them, both of whom have tried their hand at the bucolic on other occasions, in other lives. What stands out from the combination is not so much the idea of bringing them together, but what comes out of the layers. You can hear the guitar and piano as if they were part of an attempt to create a soundtrack for a film. There’s that feeling of, let’s say, landscape music (in the best sense), which leaves room to breathe and something to enter. As you enter this landscape, you realise that what they’ve done here goes beyond the spontaneous idea of music at the service of something. You start to think of Brian Eno and, above all, “Music For Airports”. Which then leads to the question of ambient music. Gunn and Moore find a place to share by combining their instruments of reference. They create music beyond service, service in the sense of music that fits an idea (if only in the association of reflection associated with the RVNG Intl. series). Everything breathes in “Let The Moon Be a Planet”, nothing happens, the movements are interwoven with sensitivity and delicacy, what you hear calms you and, above all, lets you be, as listeners. Existing with that music, feeling it and not feeling it, present and not present. When you notice it, you get better and it’s because you notice it that it stops being a servant, serving an idea. As ambient music should be. Who wants to come and levitate with them? AS

Lacuna is Inês Condeço’s first album. With the piano, voice and synthesisers as her central instruments, she explores sounds and atmospheres that wander between hope and the abyss. Assuming itself as an album within ambient, experimental and electronic music, it is a journey through the artist’s memories and emotions, where shadow and light, strength and vulnerability intertwine in a natural way. They coexist without overlapping. It’s a raw album devoid of complexities.

Inês Condeço began her musical studies in Leiria, graduated in Music (Piano – Classical Music) from the University of Évora and completed a Postgraduate Diploma in Sound Art: Experimental Processes at the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Lisbon. Over the last year she has been developing her solo project as an independent artist, exploring her own sounds and environments. At the beginning of 2024, Inês released her first album Lacuna and it is here that she presents her own identity, her own language.