It’s cold at home this week. It’s felt a long time since I was last cold. It was a tough one this morning: I woke up later to offset the day and curled into myself and dreamt unbidden. Dreams forbidden. The subconscious self rising above what the conscious withholds. Strange how we do that to ourselves.

r beny’s work always forces me into an emotional place by some force of nature akin to realising my own interior transgressions and desires, mysteriously and effortlessly. The problem is these ineffable transmissions mean I don’t know what to say now, and despite my desire to project earnestness on the internet there are some avenues that I know I should keep guarded, some feelings best left untranslated.

I knew this the second I heard the titular opener. The tenuous synthetics hovering like some dawn mist over moss, a gentle cloud that settles over my sleeping brain as some truth serum desirous to evaporate my neurons into perceivable expression. It feels so light, so intimate, that I couldn’t possibly tell you what I want, what I feel, what I want to feel. Warmth. Closeness. But there are only dreams here, there is only distance.

r beny grants little in feedback memory, only what it states in the title. Memories, which are moments that have become absences, returned to us unsolicited. I don’t wish for them even in his delicate machinations, and yet they arise all the same, and I am a slave to them.

The album proceeds delicately across every piece, especially perhaps in the longform closer “late fragment”, whose gentle recursions across 20 minutes evolve and transmute imperceptibly. The ebb and flow of neurochemical tides shift softly from more impassioned thrumming beginnings to something less physical: a feeling subjugated to the back of the mind perhaps? Or something more akin to an acceptance, integration?

Pieces, expressions, unknowns. I struggle to know what to say, or say what I know. Music as experience and feeling without definition. Or perhaps, one I hesitate to share.