Album Review: Iván Muela –‘Ether’: a subtle and sublime merging of neo-classical and experimental music.

The Breakdown

Muela brings us an album which is other-worldly, unbound by time or typology, open to your imagination but not intending to alienate. Music acknowledging the beauty of simplicity.

Ivan Muela (self-release) – 8.9

Writing a review of pianist/composer Iván Muela’s latest album ‘Ether’ feels almost like a redundant endeavour. Here is a recording likely to affect the listener differently each time they tune in, so any attempt to describe the music will only capture that one single encounter, the next time your emotions may shift. So perhaps the title is perfect. Muela brings us an album which is other-worldly, unbound by time or typology, open to your imagination but not intending to alienate. Music acknowledging the beauty of simplicity.

The London-based musician has been evolving and refining such sonic craft for a while now. Both prolific but also illusive Muela’s work emerges through a range of portals which offer a gateway for sound art created outside any pop industry parameters. Berlin’s Sign Language Recordings, the UK’s much missed Rusted Tone and Fluttery from San Fran have all been platforms for his work, but for ‘Ether’ he has returned to the autonomy of self-releasing.

The album extends approaches he has drawn on since his intimate ’59:54’ debut in 2015 . The deceptive clarity and emotional intensity of his piano playing was at the core of that release as well as 2019’s ‘Five Questions’ and once again it’s a distinctive voice on ‘Ether’. In contrast the electronic layering and field recordings, central to 2016’s ‘Unsound’ or ‘Anamnesis’ from last year, appear more diffuse here while remaining crucial to the project’s intricate detailing.

Above all though, On ‘Ether’ Muela remains an avid explorer of places where acoustic instrumentation merges with the synthetic, conventional music attributes meets experimentation, and ambient soundscapes converge with narrative. He sees the album as a whole rather than a selection of sixteen sketches, a sonic poem with four phases: birth, development, introspection and then hope. The cycle of time certainly played a part in how ‘Ether’ came together. Written and recorded from 2016 to 2022 the album could be seen to have an autobiographical dimension to its extended conception. Or maybe, as Muela says, its long gestation represents “a quiet statement against the urge to create quickly and manufacture music as a commodity“. So elevator music it is not, music to be listened to, it is.

The impressive thing about ‘Ether’ is that such a level of engagement comes readily. After the drone of Premise makes a Stars of the Lid impression with its drifting melodic ghosts and gossamer piano strokes, the opening sequence of tracks glisten with infectious vitality. The genuine humility and soulfulness of Muela’s understated piano is introduced with Grey on Amber, which lullabies and sings softly, and then continues on Hidden Magnolia. Here a rippling folk dance sways with under a tip -toeing melody until Helena Massip’s violin and Kalina Dimitrova’s cello call and sigh. It’s a similar innocent calm and delicate tension which Peter Broderick often achieves, unspoiled, unselfish music.

Two other piano pieces on the album see Muela bringing the instrument’s internal sounds to the fore, accentuating its unpredictability and suggesting vulnerability. Solid Bodies feels its way pensively, hammers clicking, panels creaking, keys clumping rhythmically, the introduction of Massip and Dimitrova’s string flourish on a single whistling note brilliantly realised. Later, on Eyes-opened, Muela exposes those same internal piano workings in the mix, although this time the pace is mournful and stoically minimal, reaching Frahm levels of intent.

It’s such threads of recurrent timbres and atmospheres, signposts and linkages which reinforce the album’s integrity. The four phases of ‘Ether’ aren’t clinically differentiated but seem left to the listener’s imagination and mood. Muela does occasionally create interludes with ephemeral sounds, a coded pulse with swirling strings (on Stuttering Chromatic Pulses), monotone electronic notes (on Swell does love) or the eerie drip of a post-rain street (Night Time Comes), but nothing interrupts the album’s steady movement. When the dynamics do spike with the granulating, electronic groan of When everything is warm blue, it feels like a turning point.

From here the soundscape is more expansive, the musical gestures grander. Help me fear the stars builds a processional momentum, scaling up from tingling chime bars to a sombre, string swelled post rock destination which Within Itself continues to explore. Here the otherworldly floats, Nat Philipps breathy partial sax notes adding that haunting detail alongside a lone violin, pining dramatically.

You wouldn’t expect Muela to leave you on this knife-edge and ‘Ether’ closes maybe not resolved but certainly more settled. Escaping, unbound is shaped by the elegiac call of the Philipps’s saxophone waking from a cosy harmonium pillow while Unearthed sees bright piano patterns rising within an expectant pulse and refreshing harmonic wash. It’s a close which hints of hope and looking forwards.

Like the work of Dustin O’Halloran or Jóhann Jóhannsson, this is an album which sees the undemonstrative Iván Muela continuing to share music which appears cared for rather than just made. ‘Ether’ is out there, patiently waiting to enthral.