When does new hope arise from the ruins of yesterday, and when does hope for the future fall apart into ruins? When does that moment come? Can we catch it, tune into it, hear it?
Adam Badí Donoval is no stranger to these stark and abandoned landscapes. Some of them were already captured on his debut album Sometimes Life Is Hard And So We Should Help Each Other (2022, The Trilogy Tapes). His approach hasn’t changed — he remains a master of sculpting frozen time, of capturing those moments when the world forgets to move forward and, with a deafening murmur, begins to gnaw at its own tail. On his second album, released by mappa, he returns to similar sonic anomalies, infused with a strong cinematic quality. His sounds erode the edges of memory and conjure situations we seem to remember, even if we’re not sure from where. A mirror where the image and the mirror wholly coincide is a seven-part series of these phantom memories.
It sounds like The Caretaker, if his ballrooms were infected by echoes drifting from Burial's late EPs. Or like The Disintegration Loops, resonating through the concrete walls and elevator shafts of socialist-era Eastern European housing blocks. Some of the raw field recordings carry the same disturbing, yet deeply vulnerable intensity of Klein’s soundscapes. Donoval is also a key figure in the community around labels like Warm Winters Ltd. — which he runs himself — as well as mappa and Mondoj.
In one track, you can hear the wail of a swampy siren, the voice of musician and singer Adela Mede. In another, there's something that resembles bells tolling across the land, strongly referencing the name of Hungarian writer László Krasznahorkai, whom Donoval mentions in the credits.
Donoval’s sonic insights are, all at once, as light as a feather drifting on the breeze — borne by a melancholic hope — and yet as heavy as the wreck of a giant ship lost in endless darkness, like a shadowed thought quietly hibernating in the subconscious.
