Water Songs by Anders Rhedin

There is a kind of intelligence that doesn’t announce itself. It doesn’t speak in headlines or shout to be heard. It flows. It listens. It responds. Water Songs, the new album from Danish ambient composer and meditation guide Anders Rhedin, is a quiet tribute to this kind of intelligence - one shaped not by noise, but by attention.

Recorded in a forest cabin near the sea in Rørvig, Denmark, surrounded by family, pine trees, and early morning fog, Water Songs draws its breath from the natural world. Taking quiet inspiration from Japanese environmental music, pioneered by masters like Takashi Kokubo and Hiroshi Yoshimur, to whom he considers himself a humble student, Rhedin’s music doesn’t just reference nature, it communes with it. Field recordings become collaborators. Ocean waves, wind through leaves, and the subtle creak of a tree at dawn are not background, they are players.
“I try to listen to what the sounds want,” Rhedin says. “Not just to capture nature, but to follow its intelligence. Sometimes it’s soft. Sometimes it’s strange. But it’s always there, if I can be quiet enough to hear it.”

A seasoned meditator with over 5000 hours of practice, Rhedin’s compositions sit somewhere between ritual and resonance. Working with gongs, cassette hiss, and synths, he doesn’t build songs so much as unfold them like ripples from a single drop. His compositions aren’t driven by momentum, but by presence, revealing themselves in their own time, like breath or tide. Each track invites a kind of arrival, not to escape the world, but to re-enter it more gently.

The album’s second half is anchored by “Water Meditation Music #1”, a 20-minute piece shaped by swirling micro-variations and the gentle waves near the coastline of an old pine forest. Like much of Rhedin’s work, it resists climax in favor of subtle movement, shifting textures that invite a stillness that slowly shifts again.

His live presentations have spanned sleep concerts on New York rooftops to sound baths north of the Arctic Circle, and operate in the same expansive spirit. Rhedin has performed in art museums across Europe, attempted to hypnotize Mac DeMarco during a spontaneous meditation session in LA, and even led a guided opening for King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard in Australia, where one person showed up. The setting rarely matters. The intention always does: presence over performance.

Water Songs is not music for doing, but music for being. It’s a reminder that intelligence can be soft. That awareness doesn’t have to be hard. That somewhere, beyond the deadlines and alerts, there is stillness, and sound knows how to find it.