It’s the great cold of 25/06/2009. The world you inhabit has been reduced to a box, and while you’re stretching your arm to feel the warmth on the other half of the bed, all you can touch is the damp bed sheet. An old record is spinning memories of adventures you might have never experienced and the whole universe is shrinking under the weight of a million tons of water and twenty-six drops of minimal extravaganza coming from the ambient artist Asher Thal-Nir.

The artist’s Miniatures, a double album that explores music as science, as act of creation, and as experiment, gathers the faintest glimmers of piano and interweaves them with an overt static loop, thus bringing into being an exquisite soundtrack for both internal and external storms. Almost two hours long and with no sign of obtuse intricacy, Asher’s album works on an incredibly simple level; what you hear is indeed all you get, but there is subtlety, elegance and refinement planted in every fragment of this convoluted innocence he explores. The feeble, barely-touched piano keys feel cold, and with every track they seem to occupy less and less space, getting gradually buried underneath the prominent layers of cranky hissing. Despite its progression, there is nothing rushed about Miniatures and similarly, no song particularly stands out. Every now and then, one might recognize a few notes, like some sort of quiet and non-violent deja-vu. Still, this familiarity will not haunt you; you will not start tracking down the bits and pieces Asher sew together to form his delicate embroidery and you might not even question the reasons behind his choice of composition.

This album might not require a special mind frame, but it is clearly weather dependant. Drenched in melancholy, the piano/strings/noise equation rhymes best with lightings and heavy showers, which might slowly become a part of the music per se, perfectly complementing its concealed turmoil. Gentle in tone throughout, there is something about the use of static that gives the album a certain "made for the bedroom" type of feel. It needs to be enjoyed in isolation, when it’s only you, the weather and the piano keys that dictate disjointed heartbeats countervailing all thunders.

Asher’s means of music making might not be entirely original, but Miniatures feels highly personal. It may well be that when you take something you don’t own, twist it around and hide it between layers of your own perceptions and sensibilities it eventually becomes yours, and this could be the case with the discovered pieces that found their shelter in the artist’s ability to re-create. Perhaps cramming twenty-six songs onto a double album sounds a tad extreme, but once one starts playing it, the sentiment that there is music on perpetually fades. And it all goes on and on and on until the last song and the rain have stopped, a rainbow is connecting two ends of an unexplored outside world and you’re ready to go through hail just to spin it once more.

-Diana Sitaru