Tony Anderson - Nuit (2021)

Nuit (translated “Night” from French) is the new flagship offering from ambient artist and composer Tony Anderson. Past works have often reflected brighter daytime energy, but Nuit is a cohesive and focused journey into meditative night music - “as if the earth were performing a silent ballet while we all slept.”

This work has a density to it - like the sense of rest we experience after waking up from a long night of REM / slow wave sleep. “It’s the deepest dive I’ve done in my music to date, yet it’s also the most simple. The music showed up and knew right where to go,” says Anderson. “People are tired. They’re exhausted. They’re feeling the weight of the world…it was clear to me early on that the music wanted to make its home inside of our collective exhaustion. Music knows right where to go, and for me I just had to stay out of the way and let it do its thing. I felt like a passenger to Nuit more than an artist or a composer. I had to be careful and slow with these songs as a result - I had to ask the songs where they wanted to go and who they were for, and this just took a lot of time. A lot of rest between writing sessions to gain perspective. Every frequency I kept in writing or mixing served the one goal of the album which was to resemble the stillness and quiet of the night. It didn’t matter if it was the Balinese gamelan bell ensemble used in Cambodia or Timbre’s haunting soprano in the album track, Nuit, nothing could be allowed to exist as a distraction, so my work was in cutting away the harshness to reveal the softness and quietness we all experience in the middle of the night.”

A custom built upright piano is the soul of Nuit. “Tracks like Éclosion and Perennial are deceptive in their simplicity,” says Anderson. “I was constantly fighting the desire to add more to the piano and opted to just let the instrument speak for itself.” But electronics also play a defining role in the work as a whole. Slipstream, among others, relies upon a blending of new and old analogue synthesis often layered with digital synths of the late 90s. “I decided to use synthesizers in a purely meditative way…staying away from harsh high frequencies is the hardest thing and the most necessary thing to do in this body of music.”

“Longer form sonic explorations like Nightingale (coming in at 10 minutes) and Retour (7 minutes) belonged on this album. Everything slows down at night when we sleep…why can’t the songs mirror that slowed pace? I wanted hypnotic arpeggiations to live in the same space as plucked harp harmonics and piano - I wanted it to feel alive, and that required more time for each song to develop so that each element could be fully heard and appreciated,” Anderson continues. “People tell you not to write longer songs because people’s attention span is too short, but I have found the opposite to be true. People want an experience more than they want a song, and that’s what I wanted to give people with this work. Halo and Lune were written during evenings where the stars and the moon were particularly visible, and though written with an electronic emphasis, they each carry the softness of moonlight and the wonder of starlight…I had to ask myself how to give what I was feeling away to the listener and I had to be sure it would connect in the same way with them.”

“At its core, Nuit is a meditative experience. Nothing you’ll hear has been rushed, and none of it has been forced. I hope it’s the same gift to you it’s been to me these many nights of channeling it and writing it.”