Away is the new album released by ambient veteran Drifting In Silence. The project’s signature pure tones and bold minimalism return with a shroud of mystery. Just when the environment seems familiar, the entire terrain shifts, revealing what has been hiding in plain sight. The album glows with maturity and gentle attention to sound design.

Away moves slowly but methodically, the smooth swells gradually climaxing in a sublime cascade of sine waves and delicate piano work. Each track is a meditation anchored by deliberate details; enormous, lush textures are balanced with bright electronica (“Breathe”) or soft, thrumming percussion (“Obscure”, “Darkwithin”). Away revels in its use of space and the massive territory allows for Drifting In Silence to photograph with a wide lens, stretching from melancholy to exaltation in its exploration of absence and the transformational effects of time.

The album is unified by the expert mastering of genre heavyweight Rafael Anton Irisarri (Grouper, Biosphere, Julianna Barwick) and brought to life by Derrick Stembridge, the sole member of Drifting In Silence. Stembridge has operated as Drifting In Silence since 2006 and has reliably evolved its mellifluous sound while maintaining focus on the deepest reaches of human emotion.

DAWN is carefully constructed from layers of ethereal and diaphanous counter-harmonies.

This Drifting in Silence interpretation allows Stembridge's multi-timbred guitar work to rise to the fore, embedded and informed by, but separate from the drifting aethers of keyboard.

The result is a translucent airiness that, rather than remaining lost in the chiaroscuro of self-reflection, illuminates it from within.

Artificial, the latest offering from Drifting in Silence, is a return to form, DiS owing its beginnings to the wave of musical innovation that was just becoming known at the time as ambient music.

Derrick Stembridge, the beating heart behind Drifting in Silence, affirms, "This album is going back to the roots of the project for me. Pure ambient." A glimpse back is no denial, however, of new influences and the project's continuing musical growth. Artificial pays homage, of course, as does the entire genre, to Brian Eno. But, Stembridge says, "this album is heavily influenced by William Basinski."

In Artificial, gone is the hard-driving multilayered percussion of previous most recent releases—though the music, itself, is as multilayered as ever. That Stembridge can successfully marry the structured with the ambient is, and has always been, his particular genius.

"Empty," the opening track, serves as an overture for the rest of the album, stating the return-to-ambience in unequivocal terms. Melody is there, in a repeating melodic pattern continually stated and restated for the listener, with background ambient harmonies providing a changing context with each restatement. Structure and rhythm, too, are present, but without the necessity of explicit beat. Following tracks develop further variations whose elements, upon examination, were already present. The voices of individual instruments come to the fore; even vocals make themselves known through subtle vocoder treatments, recognizable as voices but without allowing words to distract.

For those who have followed Drifting in Silence along its journey, Artificial will welcome back DiS' from its forays into loping, locomotive percussive rhythms into soothing yet stirring ambient form—a return that is only enhanced by the awareness that it never really went away.

Place In Time is a rich textural melange of timbres and carefully implied (but never overstated) melodies. In some cuts, including Never, the percussion instruments return, transformed into ambient textural and tonal layers. The percussion serves to leaven the ambient loaf, however, and the result is never jarring. The closing track, Perfection, summarizes the album’s musical thoughts, together with previous Drifting In Silence work, in a sonic landscape that brings to mind a drifting mechanical ocean.

Truth — weaves a tight web from beatless and atmospheric ambiences which – unlike other artists’ deliberately combined ambient sound layers – unveil obvious structures and a clear sound design.