Mixing layers of ambience and drones, with musique concrete and pulsed rhythms these pieces move like a glacier: slow and with a depth of consideration that I’ve not heard since Vidna Obmana hung up his ambient boots and became Fear Falls Burning.

The opener, “Without”,  is lush tones and ambiences mixed perfectly with the drifting almost motionless instrumentations that punctuate it. From the moment it begins you are automatically encapsulated in the bubble of this album, hearing each facet as a wholly new experience, and knowing that whilst listening to it all other senses are
effectively closed and resting.

As the album shifts the development is minor, the feelings set down are re-worked for each piece, however the details and subtleties are like icebergs, each one deeper than the minute aspect you can hear at first.

“Verses” is, shall we say, piano led, although the reverb and drone makes up more of the track as the piano tiptoes across the icy depths. Each piece on Dawn has such a gorgeously desolate quality to it, even when the instruments (piano, guitar, harp) do appear their presence does not detract form the melancholic nature.

This is ambience as it should be made: giving one a feeling of loss and yet at the same time offering hope. This isn’t music for airports or music to emulate walls.  This is open spaces,  with such huge panoramas ahead of you that to even comprehend their enormity is impossible.

Sometimes ambient music tries to hard. Hard to believe I know, but it happens. Stembridge has, with Dawn allowed the music to evolve at it’s own almost non-existent pace, and that has given the music a quality and providence that lifts the album out of the average and into
the higher planes.