Understatement is the hallmark of Pascal Savy’s ambient work. Filled with an underlying hush, there is never any hurry, no edges or harsh angles, and yet for all the quiet subtlety there is always quite a lot going on. His latest release, The Endless Seasons, lets you know from the first note of “Watching Dew” that this outing is going to be another soft drift that will take you briefly out of the timestream. Twinkling notes like the glimmer of sunlight on morning grass carry it along, never disturbing the peace of this imagined dawn. Savy moves us meditatively through his landscape, a place that is calm–but calm in the same way that if you take time to stand or sit quietly, you still hear life moving around you. Distant, small, sometimes indecipherable, but all part of the complete living  moment. Here in Savy’s work it comes as faint hisses, clanks and clicks–listen to the way it rises up like some steam-powered thing on “In Fading Light,” rubbing against foggy chords. Savy pays a lot of attention to the sense of distance in sound,which helps to create a sort of shadowbox feel to the work. But it’s a deep shadowbox, the diorama inside including little things we might not notice at first glance, but which are integral to the overall effect.

With this type of work, I typically say that it should be enjoyed both as a deep, focused listen and as a more truly ambient space-enhancer. But the detail work on The Endless Seasons is so tight, and so very intrinsic to the whole effect of the thing, that not going fully into it does both it and you a disservice. The downside to The Endless Seasons is that it’s a mere 36 minutes long. But every second has something to offer. This is a must-loop release that just gets better each time around.

Available from Field Noise Records.