Life Is Exhausting by The Void Wanderer (Review)

A good deal of dark ambient music adheres to an aesthetic best captured by Cold Meat Industry’s slogan: “For the music lover who can sit and enjoy the evolving sound of someone else’s nightmare.” In other words, dense, harrowing, and yes, nightmarish soundscapes that rumble and hiss and groan, conjuring up the darkest and most ominous experiences and environments. But with 2024’s excellent Empty World, The Void Wanderer — aka, Russian composer and producer Zaplatkin Fedor Pavlovich — crafted a gentler, more elegiac sound. That approach serves him equally well on this year’s Life Is Exhausting.

Even the album’s darkest moments, like penultimate track “Burial Lullaby,” with its opening strains that evoke classic Raison d’être, eventually morph into something that approaches celestial. Here, ebbing drones, twinkling synths, and disembodied choirs evoke stars shining brightly over a frozen Russian tundra in the deepest depths of winter. Dark and mysterious to be sure, but not at all reliant on gloomy foreboding for its emotional effect.

Much of Life Is Exhausting, however, is more akin to “Forgotten Shrine in the Mountains,” which opens the album with softly unfurling drones and ghostly traces of melody drifting through a falling rain, creating a contemplative and gently melancholy setting that’s completely immersive. (The song’s title is almost certainly a reference to Mount Shrine, the Brazilian ambient producer who died in 2021, and whose rich soundscapes clearly influenced Pavlovich.)

Given the current tumult — school shootings, political violence, economic uncertainty, global tensions — Life Is Exhausting’s title is rather on-the-nose. We’re all feeling run down and overwhelmed by the steady stream of darkness, vitriol, and violence being pushed onto us by the algorithms. I suspect that’s why I’ve listened to this album as much as I have since its release. Yes, I know I’m predisposed to highly atmospheric music with a melancholy bent, but albums like Life Is Exhausting carve out a serene, otherworldly space that provides a welcome sense of refuge in troubled times.