What Happens At Night
Seismic vibrations alter the ever-changing sonic surfaces of Jana Irmert's new release What Happens At Night. Like layers of sediment, sounds are being pushed up from underneath, floating away or sinking back to the bottom.
At the core of the album lies a question: What will be left of us? While Earth melts, we go on. But eventually, there will be a point in the future where all that will be left of humanity is a thin layer of rock. While this may seem like a deeply gloomy prospect, it also carries a great deal of comfort: the reminder that we are only a small particle in a vast system so big that we can never fully grasp it.
"When playing or improvising, it sometimes happens that time kind of stops in its usual rhythm - measures of moments and durations become blurry. I smashed and rubbed lava rocks, layered and bent sounds and field recordings until what I heard matched the images of strata in rock I was looking at: millenia of existence and non-existence, on a planet to which we are a very recent addition. I fell out of time, somewhere between the moment and eternity, and that's a feeling I wanted to capture on What Happens At Night."
All tracks produced and mixed by Jana Irmert
Mastered by Bo Kondren at Calyx Mastering Berlin
Cut by Jana Falcon at Schnittstelle
Design by Louise Mason / Sawn Off
Cover Photography by Maria Louceiro
© 2022 Fabrique Records
Supported by Initiative Musik gGmbH with project funds from the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and Media
“The sonic assemblages of Berlin based artist Jana Irmert are designed to grip the attention and provoke speculation. What Happens At Night swiftly slides from documentary lucidity into the glare of an obsession. Across the zone where human activity takes place, evocations of realities drift beyond the reach of our senses or the span of an individual life. A sobering reminder, that the limits of our perception may not coincide with those of the world.“
“One can really feel the tension this album creates and describes, the agony, the frustration and the unforeseen consequences of earth’s demise. A task taken and executed with beauty, sonic plurality, with vast evolving soundscapes and a polished production on top.“
"What Happens At Night by Jana Irmert plays a mediating role between strict sound art, the space- and time-based thinking of electro-acoustic composition and heavy, but sparingly arranged, airy dark ambient. Less than a year after The Soft Bit, a new musical voice is establishing herself here, redefining its genres and inventing its own forms of expression."
"Opening with "Particles" Jana Irmert presents a vast and spatial realm of ambience defined by echoing, slightly psychedelic Field Recordings alongside calm, meditative rhythm signatures as well as extended, comforting droning and tectonic low end movements followed by the subsequent "Ashes", an exercise in classic, yet well nocturnal Ambient minimalism. Furthermore "Dust Is The Rust Of Time" brings forth an amalgamation of swelling low end drones and subdued, stripped down Electronica textures reminiscent of deepest Deep Listening Music once brought forward by now defunct labels like Isolate before the concluding "Stratum" pairs echoes of DarkAmbient with humungous tectonic shifts, cavernous rhythms and drowning, yet glistening melodic fragments shimmering through form underneath the vast and vantablack embankments of sound which make up the very foundation of this closing piece. Good stuff, this."