I’ve spoken about it before but I often feel I have a compulsion to travel. I’m not sure it can be called wanderlust exactly, at least not all the time, sometimes it’s just a desire to escape. A trajectory away from the normalcy and rhythm of regular life for a moment, a period in time on foreign shores where you’re lead only by your whims, the stamina of your legs, stomach and bladder, and no one knows your name, or potentially even speak your language.

That being said, I’m beginning to question as I get older whether this is essential or even sustainable for me personally. On the one hand, visiting other cultures and experiencing “outsideness” is crucial to maintaining an open mind and soul, learning about the world beyond your borders and preconceptions. On the other I almost feel it chipping away at my heart, leaving it restless, unsettled, incomplete, depositing lost fragments of self littered across the atlas.

For the record, I don’t think this is entirely the intent of Merely and Malibu’s Essential Mixtape, an ambient collage of delicate compositions and field recordings dedicated to a road trip (through Sweden, not that the fragmentary sounds would necessarily imply this). The focus here is very much on the yearning and wistful remembrance of Summer travelling – a welcome memory for these dark Autumnal evenings it must be said – though the result of this polite retrospection is a dangerously wavering sense of darkness.

This is most obviously detectable in moments like “arpeggiated romance”, whose oscillating synth chords somewhat aggressively reverberate in a deep hollow, fingers of drone tendrils spidering the gaps as time stretches the discreteness of the memory out like blue-tack. Following “hymn for drifters”, although aesthetically different, is contiguously heavy as crows squawk out of its evaporating vocals and turgid synthetics, segueing further into “starslayyer”‘s borderline Ambient Trance stylings to barely coagulate into anything solid as it closes to the sound of a far off plane disappearing overhead.

This inability to touch the receding distance is really the core sensation, for although the opener “outlanders intro” chops between various recorded moments in time as whispers of voice, camera timers, rolling waves, car indicators, and other miscellanea form a tangible soundtrack of instances, much of the record is the space between. “benz” drifts on interstitial reverb, lost on a sunbeam; “for a moment” pulsates around a few gentle chords and hazy angelic warblings of voice. Even personal favourite “american pie”, with its carefully enunciated acoustic guitar, feels like it’s sublimating off the surface of time itself as it floats its way dreamily towards the closer. Not hopelessly, not even with resignation, it simply…is.

This paradox, that the desire for travel co-exists with the heaviness it brings to the heart, is a painful struggle. In its fleetingness is the value, the sense of loss and malaise it leaves behind at its conclusion is the natural consequence, the echo, of all the good things that have come to us in the past. What matters is the moment and how we choose to handle its legacy in our heart.