DJ Lostboi & Torus - The Flash (2020)

Following 2019’s hibernation, Queeste reappears with the mnestic soundscapes of DJ Lostboi and Torus’ split album The Flash. Across eight gossamer evocations—four from each artist—the duo reflect on individual journeys from airport to sea during the blissful embers of fading summer. Their gaze expands and contracts naturally with passing locations but lingers on the titular flash, what the two artists describe as “the rare sight of the sun giving off a bright green lightburst into the horizon.”

Made up of sounds sourced and appropriated from these commutes—pop music heard on the radio, jumbled street recordings, and everyday technological objects—The Flash evokes the melancholic pull of such recollections without ever succumbing to nostalgia. The moments eked from these samples stretch into quiet eternity—still and suspended—while retaining their quotidian, terrestrial qualities.

DJ Lostboi successfully refines the warped atmospherics heard on his previous edits of pop, rap, and emo. First track ‘Open World’ welcomes listeners with lapping waves and plaintive wavering tones—like a glittering video game environment—until real life interrupts on ‘Ordinary People’ as an automated answer phone message: an unknown voice lets out a weary sigh. Its foggy pianos and soft vocals offer melody and buoyancy where ‘LB 100’ circles on moody, dream-like pads. We follow the artist’s oceanic voyage to its culminating trance-like shimmers which dissolve into cool water: reflective, endless, yet ultimately hopeful.

Netherlands-based Torus foregoes the dancefloor dynamics of 2016’s Engine Malfunction for a series of calmer, cloudless drifts. On ‘Enter The Sun’—a sparse, yearning composition—washes of noise and clipped auto-tuned vocals pulse over a haunting refrain until ‘Pier’ arrives with whirring engines, sweet birdsong, and decaying synths. The album’s lightest piece comes with the skipping ‘Radiate 540’—euphoric dance minus the kick—which rises from a muffled human interaction until slow motion cinematics signal the trip’s end: ‘Arrival’ collapses into the sea elegantly mirroring DJ Lostboi’s final track.

Despite its hushed ambience, The Flash is an album committed to forward momentum. Each composition reveals a discrete chapter of DJ Lostboi and Torus’ journey building to a moment of bittersweet ascension. The results of such heartfelt wandering recall the spatial dynamics of The KLF’s zoned post-rave landscapes but these works flicker with thoroughly modern paraphernalia and emotions.