Cumulative bliss

I thought it would be easy to write about this album. It’s such a good one, and there is so much to say about it. But every time I push play and listen, writing seems impossible. Calmness takes over in no time, and anything beyond listening is out of the question. I literally sit there with my hands on the keyboard, doing nothing.

Change of strategy. Instead of writing at the end of a workday, I try my luck on a long distance train ride. What a contrast… writing about something that epitomizes the absence of speed while traveling at 150 miles per hour.

But it works. In those four hours, I can go back to the earlier albums and look at how things progressed over in Nuremberg, the place where Florian Seyberth and Peter Heider still reside. Unlikely, if you know the city, and if you know their work. In the early days they sounded like they lived somewhere deep in the Amazon rain forests, on some of their more prominent tracks they could have been from Louisiana, their fourth album suggested a move to somewhere close to the arctic circle, and now it’s… hm… where?

Even more than 2023’s “Finistère”, “Aurelia” is an album that is able to both melt all these places together, and sometimes even to dissolve them. It could easily be attributed to the fact that “Aurelia” delves into Ambient more than most of their previous efforts, but that would be too easy. There is more to it. Something like a deliberate effort to be less about moods related to places but rather about states of being.

“Deckards Harp” is an ideal introduction to this stage of the Boozoo Bajou evolution. Six contemplative piano notes, floating and echoing strings, pads and carefully selected sounds, a bass that is so low that it could be registered as the label’s “Pilotton” – pilote tone, that’s all it takes to be deeply immersed in solitude and tranquility.

That’s actually my biggest problem. “Deckards Harp”. Once I get beyond this track it’s a little easier to keep writing instead of blissfully drifting off. “Nemune” helps too. It’s one of the tracks where echoes from previous albums drift through. There is an air of “Camioux” like an Ambient homage to earlier days, a piece that sounds as if it was designed to let the absence of Tony Joe White be felt in a quiet and primarily subconscious way.

It’s not all Ambient. We also get an updated version of those super slow and deep beats that have done so much to turn their first album “Satta” into the classic that it undoubtedly is. “Una Nuova Distessa” is probably what fans and critics would have expected from Boozoo Bajou. Thankfully, it doesn’t just stay safe, it pairs the expected with the updated, like taking “Yma” out of the swamps and giving it a new place that is suspended in the air of our imaginations.

A few darker tones expand the range of what is called “Cinematic Downtempo Ambience” on the hype sticker. The slightly eerie suspense of “The Novelist” is the track that makes the categorization of being cinematic most vividly relatable. We don’t know what the title’s novelist is writing, but it doesn’t sound like a love story. It’s ominous, mysterious, something lurking, maybe not around the corner, but most probably at some point along the storyline. Or is it the novelist himself, sitting in his chamber, imagining moods and scenes to assemble for a story that might not have a happy end.

The cinematic ambiences on a track like “Stillight” for example are far less scenic, or locatable if such a word exists. It’s more like another analogy to what solitude may sound like, being alone in a space, more or less motionless, and it’s up to us to give this feeling a place. Floating and gazing, thinking, reflecting, regarding unfamiliar sights, not knowing what even the nearest future may bring.

By the time we get to “Mila”, we have grown accustomed or even fond of the blissfully dis-located aural ambiences that characterize Boozoo Bajou in 2025. This last track is a slightly woeful excursion, combining deep classic Boozoo chords with an emotional canvas that feels as if the two gentlemen aimed at creating an even more suspended and transcendental remix of Mixmaster Morris’ remix of Coldcut’s “Autumn Leaves”. In the end, everything dissolves, floats on, like something that you know will keep existing, just not within your grasp, not within your view, but eternally somewhere out there.

Where there’s life there’s hope.

Release for review:
BOOZOO BAJOU – AURELIA – PILOTTON – No 037

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