Music for the dead of night. Nocturnes brings together Veryan and Everyday Dust, two Scottish-based electronic musicians, both of whom offer up a twenty-minute piece that evokes the stillness of night and its quiet and often unseen dramas.

Both of these pieces are shrouded in mystery, full of secret pathways and shadowy interventions. On ‘Moonlight Lullabies’, Veryan creates a slowly-advancing piece that progressively evolves toward a dawn-like resolution. Subtle field recordings give this a naturalistic edge, but it’s Veryan’s electro-symphonic arrangement here that gives ‘Moonlight Lullabies’ its sense of calm, ethereal grace – stirring string layers, shimmering synth sounds that flit across your vision, a stunning arpeggio that captures the notion of a slumbering landscape coming back to life. Its denouement is a beautiful, and hopeful, chorus of morning birdsong.

Everyday Dust’s ‘As Bats Fly’ is, in contrast, almost impenetrably dark. For me, this piece evokes that strange and liminal place that only appears in the depths of night, where a sudden wakefulness into an alien silence yields a clamouring of a thousand anxieties, each one jumping up and down and shouting ‘Me, me, me!’ The sounds here have the density and bleakness of Rothko’s paintings for The Four Seasons in New York. Like the seemingly unwavering blocks of colour that Rothko used, closer examination of ‘As Bats Fly’ reveals myriad textures and nuance, layered with enveloping detail.

Nocturnes by Veryan / Everyday Dust was released 9 December 2022 by Dustopian Frequencies.

Words: Mat Smith

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