If you didn’t manage to find the time to commit to appreciating ambient music in 2020, so far 2021 is, unfortunately, another year where stillness is necessary for maintaining sanity, and time to devote to meditation is abundant. In other words it’s the perfect moment for Europa to arrive. The debut full-length ambient project from Dave Depper—who you may know as a core member of Death Cab for Cutie’s present iteration, or as a studio musician accompanying the likes of Robyn Hitchcock, Sharon Van Etten, and Ray LaMontagne on recent recording sessions—is populated with loop-based guitar recordings that often recall the calm-before-the-storm post-rock guitars of Explosions in the Sky (without the eventual storm part, obviously).
Today Depper is offering an early stream of the record he’s been ideating for over five years. It’s “a few things at once,” he explains, “an audio travelogue of a journey across another continent, an attempt to fill countless idle hours with something productive, a time capsule from another era, music you can pay rapt attention to on a beautiful Sunday morning, and music you can safely ignore as you read in the bath. But above all, it was my attempt to translate a feeling of physical place into an intimate, improvised musical performance.”
Exhale and hear it in full below via Jealous Butcher Records.
