Diljin Rising by Daniel Craig

Cat.#: LONTANO-S-CD50
Release date: 20/12/2024
Format: CD, Digital

We begin this small tour around 1995. I am not able to sleep. With no immediate prospect of ending this bad infinity, I create a tower from my pillows and fashion my blankets into a cave. Soon enough I fall asleep; the structuring of this formerly empty and directionless time had pushed me towards its conclusion.

Now 2019, I acquire a Revox reel-to-reel tape machine. I record many hours of improvisations, sending sounds from my Max MSP patch directly onto tape loops. Covering up the erase head with some cardboard, I enjoy listening to melodies gradually fade away as new layers are burned on top. The sounds I use are constantly plundered and re-plundered from past work of mine, forever composting my own musical memories. I like how the tape adds an extra layer of haze to the already distant fragments.

Now early 2024, I am in a small community in the Australian outback. I constantly refresh my browser to see the water height at Diljin Hill, to work out whether the river would flood us 12 hours later. As the flood waters rise and we get cut off from the outside, I can’t help but conceive of another sense of time, of grand time.

An eternal rhythm constructed not by humans, but by the land and the skies above it.

A slowly shifting present that doesn’t necessarily offer deprivation, but rather more of the less. A sense of what is, rather than what could be.

An eternal time that doesn’t require a neat sign-off from a conversation.

But why must I rely on the computer to see our fate? Might it not be better to just look eastward and see if clouds are gathering above the catchment?

And in any case, why must I obsess over travelling 12 hours into the future?


In early 2020, as the world goes into a restless slumber, I start to conceive of this album. As did the floodwater, a natural force precipitates a lasting present. Gradually I plow through recordings from the year before in order to find material. My original plan is to make a long, single piece of slowly developing music, that might help bridge the listener across the empty span of a night. Gradually I start to favour smaller vignettes, each separate from the universe, with no clear antecedent or consequence. You can find signs of both on this album.

Does this change of plan weaken the ability to induce sleep?
Or is that what dreaming is?
The construction of some sort of overarching sensibility, or even meaning, from our mishmash of fleeing presences in our age of being?

I write this now from yet another time and place. I am trying my best to make sense of some notes I wrote about 8 months ago, which were themselves derived from a book by a well-known contemporary Korean/German philosopher. Perhaps, dear reader, you picked up this reference throughout my little ramble?

As they tend to do, my musical tastes and interests have changed considerably since I began this album. Yet I have enjoyed returning to it when it suited my mood. While tired or lacking energy it has been a warm blanket to guide me. As I look out my window now, the sky is grey and the wind is blowing leaves off the trees. Perhaps this might have formally been a trigger to open up this project folder.

There are still traces of this album in my newer work. It sits as a dream to my more current work; a lingering warmth while the moonlight has already died.

I am gradually getting better at falling asleep as well.

What’s that rustling outside my window?
Or is it a faded memory whispering to me?

Ssshhh, time to sleep
Let the hiss guide you

Thank you to Vicky, who kindly let me use this amazing photo. And thank you to Andrea, who has been an absolute dream to work with, and who also did a particularly sensitive job of the mastering.

I hope you enjoy this album, and I hope you don’t get stuck in too many bad infinities.

Lᴏɴᴛᴀɴᴏ Series is a division of Rohs! Records.

Est. 2018 - Berlin, Germany.

The label is now located in Sardinia, Italy.

“Lontano” is an Italian word meaning far away, a definition reflected in the label’s logo—a range of mountains seen from a distance.

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