In our everyday lives, we often have to confront an extremely limited vocabulary when talking about music. Faced with questions, people often tend to respond with elusive adjectives; words are unwound even before we end up facing a piece of paper with a pencil in hand. And yet, sometimes that piece of paper turns out to be our greatest enemy, for a  new names can  frequently  force our minds to be as blank as the paper we are staring at. For that matter, France’s Alexandre Navarro brings forth Arcane – ten simple reasons for why silence is almost always more blaring than words.

Throughout his album, two guitars in perfect harmony explore silence and every inch of its tonalities. Then, unforeseen electronics kick in as a calibrator, determining not a mood, but a specific space and time; thus Arcane reveals itself as surprisingly cinematic. All tracks follow a well-determined pattern, slowly drawing the listener in while offering no sense of melancholia, just nostalgia for places one has never visited. Navarro’s music exhibits an incredible freedom of choice: it is as though every single note was shot on celluloid, but when screened numberless films come into sight. From scraps of ethereal nature to lost towns in unheard of countries and the impression of a sung haiku in “The Dawn,” the album has every solution covered in case of a breakdown of time.

A swarm of textures emerge into a sardonic yet beautifully crafted ritual – a mere allusion for our daily routine. Oblique as Arcane may be, there pervades no feeling of pretentiousness; every track is reduced to the bare minimal, where the route is known beforehand and they rise no expectation whatsoever. All ten of them add up in a tranquil and rarefied climax, building up skyscrapers that stud a secluded city in a perfect but improbable future.

For an ambient album, Arcane transpires as unexpectedly upbeat. While it does examine all possible changes of heart in a fifth season, not for a second does it replace its optimistic character with a plaintive one, ultimately bestowing the record’s refinement. Repetition here acts as something far from frustrating, for in many ways it is what stores the perfect balance all tracks acquire. If anything, one must find a comfort zone in order to be able to stand hearing the whole album, which has become an incredibly difficult thing to do in our modern times; but if somehow you discover that place where reality is less distorted, you’ll find that time does stop sometimes, even if just for fifty-three minutes and thirty seconds.

-Diana Sitaru