Bastien Pons’ “Black Clouds” feels more like a place than a song: a slow, enveloping atmosphere you stumble into and slowly dissolve within. Featuring Frank Zozky, it opens Pons’ debut album Blinded with a quiet pull that’s as visual as it is sonic. From the first pulse of static, you can sense that this isn’t music meant to entertain, it’s meant to be inhabited.
The track begins with the faintest crackle, like light flickering behind a closed eyelid. Then come the drones: vast, patient, and softly blurred, stretching across the soundscape until you lose track of where one tone ends and another begins. Zozky’s voice floats somewhere in the middle distance, a human echo fading in and out of consciousness. He doesn’t sing so much as leave traces, dissolving gently into Pons’ world of distortion and stillness.
Pons, trained in musique concrète and deeply rooted in the visual arts, sculpts sound like texture. You can hear his photographer’s precision in the way silence is shaped, in the deliberate pacing of every hiss and decay. There’s no rush to reveal, no promise of resolution, only a patient unfolding that blurs memory, presence, and absence.
Listening to “Black Clouds” feels like watching a photograph develop underwater: shadows forming, details emerging, then melting away before you can name them. It asks for stillness, for trust, for a kind of surrender that defiantly rare nowadays.
By the time it ends, you realize nothing much has happened, yet everything has. You’ve drifted somewhere quiet and unresolved, carried by sound that barely touches the surface yet somehow reaches deep inside..
