1 Mile North - The Sunken Nest

Much as I love minimalist and ambient music, it can be tricky to review or even talk about because to explain what makes a particular ambient album "good" somewhat eludes the confines of language. Some of my favorite ambient acts- Kali Malone, Maria w Horn, Ellen Arkbro, Hollie Kenniff, Stars of the Lid, Eluvium- occasionally produce songs or even full albums of little more than a few droning notes. The act of describing what is meaningful about such austere music inherently requires you to delve into what a song even is, and how a series of notes weaves its way into your psyche or our life.

That's a long wind up to say that ambient project 1 Mile North is one of the most important musical acts in my personal biography and the album they released this week, "The Sunken Nest," is a beautiful reminder of exactly why that is.

20 years ago, I had a soul-draining job that sucked up too much of my time for comically little compensation. The best part of my day was, consistently, stopping by a coffee shop on my way home from work and taking an hour to just sit, sip a drink, and read a book, to decompress after an invariably grueling day. 1 Mile North's 2003 album "Minor Shadows" was my soundtrack to those moments for a full year and, to this day, hearing the chord changes in songs like Life Indoors or Return to From Where We Came off that album touches parts of my brain that bring me right back to the exact feelings and experiences I was having at that point in my life.

"The Sunken Nest" is instantly recognizable as a 1 Mile North album by virtue of certain signature features which no other act has ever fully been able to match for me. There's a warm guitar tone, for example, that 1 Mile North can regularly achieve that feels like putting on a familiar coat for the first time in a year as the season flips over to winter, and a specific way they layer textures and instruments that's reminiscent of watching your favorite moment in a movie from your teenage years for the first time in a long while. For example, on the final song of the album, "Your Sunken Nest," each new layer of the song, starting at about the 30 second mark, complicates the vibe of the passage, adding little bits of depth and complexity even as the song stays starkly minimalistic throughout. 1 Mile North are unparalleled in their ability to do this sort of thing- use little changes or flourishes to evoke whole worlds of mood or meaning, even as the song remains airy and sparse.

Because every 1 Mile North album has managed to work its way into my life in such a way that I associate the space between the notes on each one with specific memories and feelings and places, it's always a big deal to me when they drop a record. Hopefully, if you like ambient as well, I hope you give it a listen, too.