I have finished a new album. This one follows a completely separate path from Kumea Sound — no handpan will be heard on it. The album grew out of a simple desire: to hear a very long sustained note played on a very low flute.
The result became an exploration of maximalist minimalism — all compositions revolve around sustained A notes, pulses, and movement in the stereo field, occasionally branching into harmony. I wanted to explore the relationship between a sustained tone, textures, and perceived spatiality.
I will release the album under a new alias, Atonauer. Yet this name feels like more than just an alias. In 2023, Atonauer appeared to me in a dream. I was possibly in New York, attending his massive retrospective exhibition. The show featured hundreds of large blue paintings, each paired with a musical composition. Together, the sounds and paintings formed a bureau-like maze — an installation that felt more like a spatial catalog or archive of his work than a conventional aesthetic retrospective.
After seeing the show, as we walked across a plaza in front of the museum, I saw his easily recognizable bearded figure exit through the main doors. He was wearing his famous light-colored, wide-brimmed fedora. The people on the plaza recognized him and greeted him with massive applause. In that moment, it struck me how remarkable an artist he truly was.
After waking up, I had a lingering sense that Atonauer was real. I remembered his paintings and how their musical components had sounded. It felt unreal that I could imagine all of that. There was a strong element of Yves Klein (the blue color and the use of drone sound), but as a character, Atonauer reminded me more of Brancusi, with his beard and simple clothing.
I wasn’t ready to return to painting — as a student, I had experimented with it for a time but soon focused my studies on sound and installation art — yet I couldn’t let go of the dream of seeing or hearing some part of Atonauer’s work in our version of reality. So, I started with sound. Within a few months, I had sketched out a 43-minute ambient album that revolves around the note A.
I suppose I could have released the album back in 2024, but I got busy moving to a new house, marrying my wife, and having a child. In the summer of 2025, I did the final tweaks to the tracks and sent the album to Taylor Deupree for mastering. He did a wonderful job giving the tracks their final sheen — which, in this case, felt more like a soft powder coating than polishing. The drones and sounds on the album have weight and texture; they dance and swirl around the listener, giving a sense of being surrounded by something enormous, deep, and ever-transforming.
“Ocean in A” will be out in a couple of weeks. I’ll announce the release date once I receive the vinyl delivery schedule from the manufacturer. The album will come out on my new label, Future Sonant — a sister label to Future Rust, which I founded in 2019. While Future Rust continues to focus on forward-looking handpan music, Future Sonant will serve as a home for more experimental and exploratory works.
