Daniël Jolan, “Sublime Lenteur” (Lost Tribe Sound, 2026)
This is the first major release by this Belgian composer under his given name, as Jolan normally records as ‘t Geruis. He did previously self-release a digital album (#7) as himself back in 2024, but that was followed by another ‘t Geruis release. Consequently, I am not sure if this counts as a name change or if Jolan has some kind of personal stylistic delineation that determines which name feels right for which albums, but Sublime Lenteur (“The Amazing Slowness”) still sounds a hell of a lot like ‘t Geruis to me. While that is a perfectly welcome state of affairs, this album does have its own distinctive character which may possibly be related to its inclusion in Lost Tribe Sound’s seasonal mood-driven “Moss & Melee” series. Then again, maybe not. Mystery abounds. In any case, this is an impressively strong album, as Jolan’s usual bleary and smudged ambient vision is beautifully enhanced with hypnotically looping melodies on degraded tapes that place his work a bit closer to minimalist auteurs like Celer and William Basinski than usual. The shadowy and dreamlike moods, however, are still distinctly Jolan’s own.
According to Jolan, this album first began to take shape in October 2024 during “long and solitary walks in the woods” through fog, snow, and rain. Frequently, he would return from those walks feeling inspired and he soon noticed that his music began to feel like a “direct translation” of the thoughts and impressions that emerged while immersing himself in nature, seasonal transformation, and solitude. To be fair, he could have plausibly said that exact same thing about any of his previous albums, yet Sublime Lenteur does feel like an improved and enhanced distillation of the simplicity and meditative, quiet beauty of earlier ‘t Geruis albums. In fact, the opening “Ressac I” probably represents my Platonic ideal for great ambient music, as it is essentially just a sensuously looping chord swell that eternally dissolves into a reverberating fragment of melody. While that may sound quite simple on its face, Jolan’s artistry lies in the way the entire piece feels flickering, frayed, and unstable, which makes the loop feel mesmerizingly cyclic yet eternally changing. Instead of sounding like a mere well-crafted loop, “Ressac I” instead feels like a precarious and ephemeral bit of heaven that I wish would extend into infinity.
The album’s other highlights roughly adhere to a similar template in that they all tend to be essentially a single haunting or beautiful loop floating through murky and evocative landscapes of hissing and distressed tapes, shadows, and mystery. In lesser hands, I would describe that as “variations on a theme,” yet Jolan’s bag of tricks is varied enough to ensure that Sublime Lenteur instead feels like seven masterfully focused, minimal, and immersive dreamscapes with their own individual character. For example, the heart of “Brume” is ostensibly a looping minor key piano melody, but the hypnotic backdrop feels like a slow, cyclical whoosh of passing cars recorded beneath an overpass. Eventually, the piano melody seems to fall out of phase with itself and begins to feel confused, erratic, and tremolo-enhanced, yet I found myself more fascinated by the car sounds, as they again feel both compellingly mantric and continually changing.
Elsewhere, the frayed and celestial-sounding loop at the center of “Étendue I” is slowly engulfed in a blissed-out roar that made me feel like I was being raptured up to heaven. Lamentably, that feeling proved to be illusory and I remain annoyingly earthbound, but the consolation prize is that I got to hear the quietly gorgeous coda of haunting and sensuous subterranean murmurs.
“Battement” is an appropriately slow and sublime highlight as well, as Jolan’s vision is reduced to just a smeary and bleary piano motif and the hiss of falling rain until the acoustics take on an increasingly strange and hallucinatory character in the final moments. While the remaining three pieces did not connect with me quite as deeply, they are quite strong as well and sustain the album’s sublime and melancholy spell beautifully. In short, Sublime Lenteur is an aptly titled and quietly mesmerizing album that approximates a flickering and ghostly vision of a Victorian ballroom dance frozen in a state of endlessly looping suspended animation. Jolan is unquestionably onto something great here, as the organic simplicity and hypnotic repetition of these pieces feel like a sublime nexus in which contemporary sound art begins to blur into something considerably more timeless and sacred.
Listen here.
