False Awakening by Drifting In Silence

With False Awakening, Drifting In Silence offers a deep contemplation of Carl Jung’s dream theories. Across the album, a pulsing, rhythmic collage of field recordings and synthesizer pads lay the foundation for meditative strains of piano and guitar. These reveries on our primordial nature feel as familiar as a dream can be, like an alien we’re certain we’ve met before. This careful study of Jung’s theories is a profound collection of sonic textures that are at varying times reminiscent of Vangelis, Robert Rich, or Max Richter.

The calming ambience of “Myth of Memory” beguiles you into tranquility before the album slips down into the unknowable abstract. The enigmatic synthesizer of “Preconscious Mind” stutters forward as if trying to piece together the disparate parts of a dream. Meanwhile, “Unknown Archetype” practices the art of total fragmentation, the mellow piano scattered in a sonic storm of brooding synthesized pads. As the album reaches its close with “Silent Patterns” and “False Awakening,” a certain clarity is achieved, like the haze of a trance falling away. The journey through the unconscious achieves its zenith and Drifting In Silence achieves a full portrait of what it feels like to dream.

Drifting in Silence is the name of a longstanding ambient project undertaken by multi-instrumentalist and composer Derrick Stembridge. Stembridge chose the name as "a description of the feeling evoked by the music," intended to create the sensation of movement through regions of light and shadow.

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