-
New music
The Ambient Panorama 01: Ostel and the roads for salvation
In the first installment of "The Ambient Panorama," I'm pleased to share my passion for ambient and modern classical music, along with a desire to support the talented artists within this genre. Hosted by the wonderful team at letssubmit, this series will highlight music releases that I believe are truly worth your attention. We begin with a look at Ostel's latest album, a deeply emotional and introspective work that navigates the complexities of the human experience. Through these posts, I hope to inspire you to explore these beautiful soundscapes and discover the hidden gems within the ambient music world.
What’s “The Ambient Panorama”?
It’s Edoardo Gastaldi here, speaking. I am a music composer delving into the ambient and modern classical realms. For a long time, I had this idea knocking in my mind: starting to write something about the music I love, and the wonderful network of like-minded artists I want to support more and more. So here we are – ending up with “The Ambient Panorama”, a series of Blog posts that will be (super kindly) hosted by Joel in the Blog Post section of letssubmit. In each episode, I will spend some paragraphs presenting a music release or a compilation that for several reasons is in my opinion worth mentioning. It eventually is an additional reason to discover the beautiful hidden gems currently streaming on our networks at letssubmit, isn’t it?
Let’s move to the core of the first episode: About Ostel and his 2024 Album.
The opening article of “The Ambient Panorama” is entirely dedicated to a recent Album release by Ostel – the artistic name representing the vision of Mexican artist Sergio Sanza, who is both a talented musician and a colleague of mine.
The Album, titled “we lock our dark halves deep in the basement of our souls but darkness always finds a way of seeping through the cracks” (indeed, ambitious title) finds its tiny room in today’s music industry, in a way that I would define both delicate and visionary.
With the experimentally creative approach, typical of Ostel, the artist made an effort to express the intricate thoughts that float inside the mind of a human being. It almost looks like a literary opera in which the listeners live in first person the struggles emerging from the music. Ostel brought to the surface all the inner conflicts that anyone of us, less or more, deal with. The whole Album is perceivable as a journey through different states of mind and situations of the author, and therefore, of the listeners themselves. In each track, Ostel captured an istantanea of a mood, trouble, sovrastructural problem.
The track “lounge chat with my inner demons” is a way to experiment with the creative act of listening. If we can’t suppress our thoughts, we open a dialog with them. We listen, then we talk, eventually finding a way through, a way of convergence. Most of the Album is filled with similar soundscapes and thoughtscapes – they all converge with the difficulty of adhering to reality (i.e., “everything fades”, “tormented souls”). As we move on, the very last part of the Album appears as unveiling the possibility of redemption – “the space between the cracks” – it opens up for possibilities. And among all, the possibility of hope: not all is lost. The grand finale, the outro, is not only magnificent but also ambiguous, as any great Album outro should be. “deliverance”, stands as a way of obtaining freedom, from what’s haunting – the coronation of the concept of hope. “deliverance” also stands as the action of being released to the universe, to heal from this condition that haunts our tormented souls, the human condition. In this sense, freedom is the other side of the medal, the other side of life – passing away.
So is deliverance the conquest of awareness, or is deliverance the act of disintegrating in a thousand directions? I leave the readers and listeners with the question open, hoping to gather some interest in the Album itself. It was a pleasure to write again for letssubmit.
Edoardo Gastaldi just presented “The Ambient Panorama”, a new series of ambient music articles written in collaboration with the team at letssubmit.
