about the record

Los Angeles composer and producer Nicolas Snyder’s second album, Spell of Remembrance, is a spiritual embrace of spontaneity, searching for spaces of dreamlike mutation. Following the deliberate spatial stasis of his 2020 full-length, Temporary Places, Nicolas Snyder’s first release on Evening Chants presents ambient music with an active, percussive sensibility, crackling with life via unpredictable amalgamations of field recordings, found sound, and manipulated palettes of earthy instrumentation, traversing woodwinds, dulcimers, harps, and more.

Crafted via stream-of-consciousness approaches, Spell of Remembrance’s twelve serpentine tracks morph in an elegant, ever-constant flux–simultaneously meticulous in their through-composed nature, while breathing with a delicate cinematic impulse, assisted by Snyder’s background in film and sound design. Snyder’s assemblages come via both self-collected sources and serendipitous encounters: from scavenged 1960s horn recordings forgotten in abandoned tape reels, to the producer’s self-dubbed “thups”–samples and rhythmic derivations from Snyder’s field recordings of nature.

Snyder’s spiritual concerns deeply influence these processes of assembly. Evoking and uniting images of forgotten lives and cosmic memories, the album’s transformative flow mirrors his concept of transcendental experiences, reconciled as singular wholes across individual lifetimes. But though in part also informed by the composer’s nostalgia and childhood experiences, Snyder’s second album reaches far beyond personal recollection–seeking to touch upon universal experiences that transcend individual memories, while also examining the liminal spaces that lie between accessing them. Presented in dialogue with both the earth and lives forgotten alike, Spell of Remembrance is a spiritually resonant journey through universal memory, in search of summoning something far greater–the recollection of one’s personal divinity.