Following the quietly powerful debut ‘Moment’, still fades returns with ‘Oceans Above And Skies Below’ – an album shaped by cosmic wonder and grounded in emotional honesty.
The new record expands the sonic palette of his first album, introducing sweeping ambient soundscapes inspired by the vastness of the cosmos. Yet beneath the grandeur lies something far more intimate: delicate piano passages, quiet textures, and a sense of presence rooted in the everyday. It’s an album that finds meaning in both the infinite and the immediate – the galaxies overhead and the fleeting beauty of a moment here on Earth.
A deep sense of dynamics runs through the album – not just in sound, but in feeling. Preserving that natural rise and fall, that tension and stillness, was essential. In a world where modern music often flattens its emotional peaks in pursuit of loudness, ‘Oceans Above And Skies Below’ chooses depth instead. You can hear it in the contrast of the driving, layered synths of “A Chorus for the Nameless”, and in the fragile piano improvisation of “Sunday Afternoon”. Both live in the same universe, yet speak entirely different languages – and that contrast is the heart of the record.
“I set out to write something massive, something celestial,” he says. “But in the process, I found smaller truths – honest, fragile pieces that felt very personal. That contrast felt powerful to me.”
This is music to breathe in slowly – a meditation on scale, perspective, and the personal universe we each carry within us.
