Windows by Marta Mist (Review)

2024 was a good year for Sound In Silence. The ambient/experimental label released a slew of albums from some of its most stalwart artists, including Ludvig Cimbrelius (Eternell, Illuvia), Yellow6, Panoptique Electrical, Memory Drawings, and The Green Kingdom. And then there was Marta Mist.

Windows is the musical collective’s second release on Sound In Silence, following 2022’s Eyes Like Pools, and it finds bandleaders Gavin Miller (worriedaboutsatan) and Sophie Green (Her Name Is Calla), and their various collaborators, exploring a form of instrumental post-rock that honestly, renews my faith in the genre. While many post-rock artists consistently adhere to similar tropes (e.g., epic songs broken up into distinct movements, repetitive slow-burning progressions, gradual build-ups to inevitable and predictable climaxes), Marta Mist embraces a more fluid tack.

There’s an improvisational feel to Windows, as if we’re listening to Miller, Green, et al. figure out the album’s densely layered songs even as they’re recording them. As a former wielder of the four-string, for instance, I’m fascinated by how the songs’ bass lines evolve. There’s never anything flashy going on, just simple evolutions that always keep things interesting. The same holds true for the jazzy drumming, which makes heavy use of the ride to keep the songs sounding expansive while throwing in a fill here, a roll there, or a quick little beat cluster to add more layers of sonic intrigue.

It’s difficult to chart where songs like “Patches,” “Otra Vez,” and “C’est Tout, Les Amis” will go, and they often end up in quite different places than they started. Even so, everything sounds entirely cohesive and of a whole. I hesitate to describe Windows as “playful”; a certain melancholy intrigue does pervade the album’s 30+ minutes. Nevertheless, there’s an undeniable sense of freedom and experimentation at work here. Nothing so chaotic, mind you, that the music threatens to fly off the rails or become unlistenable. Rather, it’s the sense of freedom that comes from competence, from knowing what you’re doing and being able to trust in that — which is certainly the case with Miller, Green, et al.

When my friends and I discovered bands like Mogwai, Do Make Say Think, Godspeed You! Black Emperor, and Labradford in the late ’90s and early ’00s, it was quite liberating to realize that music didn’t have to be locked into traditional “verse, chorus, verse” structures to be beautiful or meaningful. Listening to Windows takes me back to those heady and exciting days, and serves as a healthy reminder that post-rock, by its very nature, can be a limitless genre — if you’re willing to do a little exploring, that is. I’m glad Miller, Green, et al. chose to do just that.