Not Waving & Romance - Wings Of Desire

From Boomkat :

Ecstatic’s flagship ambient duo take cues from Botticelli’s ‘The Birth of Venus’ for a new journey into the sublime after serving some of this decade’s most cultishly adored sides. This time they give a more surreal and illusive take on their thing, all smudged chorals and strings, rendered like a half remembered fever dream.

The timeless beauty of Not Waving & Romance’s C.15th Italian renaissance muse is echoed in this new eight-part suite that continues in a heart-clutching vein of work that Romance began with ‘You Must Remember This’ in 2020, and which has seen the anonymous operator consistently wow with a slew of solo and collaborative gems, including a pair with Dean Hurley, David Lynch’s right hand sound guy. 

Voluminous yet intimate and self-evident in its seductive beauty, ‘Wings Of Desire’ poetically pitches listeners into a parallel dimension of beauty and introspection detached by unfathomable layers of intangible reverb that keeps everything achingly out of reach. Its pieces incrementally shift perspective from widescreen, deferred gratification on the 9 minute ’Shepherds Dream’ and its lapping pink noise and oceanic choral drift, thru to a detailed, nuanced gaze that grows to near lusting intensity by the album’s lushly infernal evocation ‘Over The Sea of Death’, where they push the sublime into the dissonant red with the mastery of a Fennesz classic. 

The pair bring the best out of each other on a standout of swooning string pad loops ‘From The Weary Earth To The Sapphire Walls’, and a crest-swelling centrepiece ‘Love Pervades the Sinless Breast’ whose ohrwurming motif calls from the recesses of pop-cultured collective memory, to the vaporwave soul glide of ‘Scaffold of Sighs’, and keening, diaphanous sensation imparted by ‘Everybody Hurts.’, perfectly pitched between Malibu’s low-lit bliss, and The Caretaker’s slow ascent to the afterlife.

https://boomkat.com/products/wings-of-desire-a2d558b1-e575-481b-82ef-269891a2096a

Guess it will be available later on Ecstatic bandcamp

Here it is :

This is lush as fuck.

This Romance fella is very prolific isn't he? Between the Not Waving collabs, the Dean Hurley ones and his solo stuff, he's put out about 10 records in the last 5 years. I suppose his production techniques are not particularly labour intensive, but still..

I first posted Romance on here in late 2020. The style was quite different to now.

Back then, I had feeling that it would be a low output/high quality music thing. I was wrong on both.