ANNE CHRIS BAKKER - Thinking The Ocean

If leaving is a little like dying, then every traveller must weigh the past as a handful of precious objects buried beneath countless trinkets; and because suitcases keep getting smaller and airlines ever stingier about hold luggage, before setting off one has to find the courage to leave most of it behind and choose only the essentials to carry along, towards that new patch of earth which, one day, one hopes, might be called "home". It's in this frame of mind that we find Anne Chris Bakker on his fifth solo album: a heartfelt farewell to his native Netherlands, paired with the melancholy of new beginnings endured in Norway, where he has now permanently settled. The result is a minimal, introspective work, more immediate than his previous efforts with the Kleefstra brothers and than his first brilliant solo outings, which for all its simplicity reveals an urgent inspiration and a more direct compositional approach.

Made with a stripped-down setup easy to carry around (a laptop, a midi keyboard and a microphone), the record is a portrait of the traveller's solitude, of the icy intimacy of the "non-places" so dear to Augé and Brian Eno, but also of the fascination radiating from the majesty of unfamiliar natural landscapes.

But whereas with the Kleefstra brothers nature waged a futile survival struggle against modernity and the cruelty of profit, here, through the inescapable vastness of the ocean, it emerges instead as a primordial spectacle, a source of existential reflection.

The heavy use of electronics (and the abandonment of the usual guitar) forms the album's core; the lengthy "Fleinvær" and "Langholmen" are suites of strings and reverb, floating vibrating echoes drifting over calm, liquid pads; intimations of farewell and visions of eternal ice. "Langholmen" in particular, with its ecstatic tragedy, perfectly captures feelings of abandonment and uprootedness, of nostalgia and mystery. A cinematic soundtrack for travellers who will not return, who, like characters out of Paul Bowles, land on continents in order to forget themselves, with no wish to look back.

The closing "Averø" ends the record in a triumph of strings, drones and electric-piano delay, where the tragedy reaches its akmé and the soundscape takes on the endless, solitary hues of eternal ice.

The one sore point is the field-recording work, present above all in "Nyksund", which here is perhaps handled a touch too crudely: the sounds of water and squawking gulls struggle to blend harmoniously with the musical material, ending up as mere ambient noise, while the piano carries on, discreet and indifferent, in its mournful progression.

Anne Chris Bakker confirms himself a sensitive, skilled artist, delivering an inner travel diary, deep and confidential, in which wonder and nostalgia mingle with a light touch; contemplating the ocean through an airplane window dissolves the past, and over one's memories, like a white mist, settles a benign, oblivious immensity.

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18/05/2026