Ambient pushes of strings and sound and churning pianos, deeply patient, deeply repetitive, a slow-motion duel between Sigur Ros and The Disintegration Tapes refereed by Explosions in the Sky on ketamine.
It lands in a strange ambient valley though. It's not as pure enough to become object-in-rotation ambient; you can't you unpack its layers as meditation when too-noticable shifts let parts bob in and out of frame. And it's not narrative ambient - the shifts are too slow, too detached from emotional arcs.
In the valley is landscape ambient, where you progress overimpassive terrain slowly, watching rivers connect, hills ebb into one another, contour lines flowing slowly. The landscape though, it's boring. The sound's not especially well designed, not especially well paced, as if created automatically, without any particular nod towards listener experience, just here. Like a landscape somewhere far away.
There's an artistic purity to that. But ambient music doesn't have to be this boring: it can use all that space and time to stimulate intellectually, to dredge emotionally, to construct, to speak. Nightmare Ending too often just feels like gain knobs, turned slowly, hoping to stumble into your affections 2.5/5
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