Amsterdam’s Anton Pieete ups his house anchor and sets sail for Balearic waters on raft of balmy ambient for his home city’s Wake Dream label

Closest in spirit to his work as Darling on Young Marco’s Safe Trip, the ‘Braisn’ album makes a clean break with his minimal tech house releases under his own name (last spotted on Ovum in 2016) toward sunnier climes and sensations. Expect a bevy of languid guitars and analogue synths shaped into sun-freckled melodies and sometimes spiced with jazzy breaks, but more often left floating and beatless in space. “Born into a family of sound designers and making his own initial steps into a life of music in the late nineties in trash and hardcore metal bands and via an inherited drumcomputer into techno and minimal in the early 2000’s, Anton switched to the Darling moniker in 2016 with a series of kaleidoscopic retro-futurist releases on Voyage Direct and Safe Trip. With Brains, Anton Pieete comes full circle and takes the next step, putting a lifetime of musicality, recording experience into a highly musical album, having given himself room for exploration, not being fixed on an end goal. The 11 songs on Brains are filled with emotion, some sweet and hopeful, some gloomy and restless.”