Warm Graves - Ease (2022)

Arriving seven years on from their 2014 debut album Ships Will Come, Warm Graves (the moniker of Leipzig-based composer Jonas Wehner) return with their second studio album, Ease, on Fuzz Club Records. This seven-year gestation between the two albums brings with it a transformation in the creative process of Warm Graves, much like the human body exchanges its cells every seven years – our human bodies being both the same and wholly other.

Where 2014’s Ships Will Come dealt in ethereal, dream-like atmospherics guided by an operatic choir, Ease offers a collection of harsher, more experimental electronic works touching on dark ambient drone, austere coldwave and synthesised kosmische musik. The transitions in this new album are more violent than before, expressing the difficult personal and social upheavals of its composition period. The choir is now absent and Wehner’s own voice assumes a more central, hypnotic stance. The soundscapes of the first album make way for something darker and a concentration of melody into a single voice – a voice no longer collective, but embodying both isolation and intimacy.