THOMAS UMBACA - Waiting For Music To Surprise Me Again

After the excellent 2023 debut "Umbaka", the Anglo-Italian pianist returns with a more layered, orphic work, marked by a quiet desire to wander and let himself be surprised by the world and its small things.

Co-produced by Amedeo Pace (Blonde Redhead), the record doesn't abandon its new classical vein and still places the piano at the heart of its compositions, but it broadens its evocative potential with new elements: an intricate web of synths, electronics, samples and suspended voices helps build an unpredictable environment in which the spirit can manifest itself.

The tracks emerge on listening like visions and dreams, moments of drowsy half-sleep, where memories and nostalgia mix with surprise, and questions take on the blurred outlines of uncertainty. The music moves like a slow dawn, its mild light uncovering deserted city architecture or shadowy natural windings, gently reawakening a sense of the world that had until then grown faint. The result is a continual stirring of the soul, a growing awareness of being part of a larger design, both musical and existential, one that moves from small things through the subtle strings of the piano, which unravels and orders everything, sustains and directs everything.

Emblematic of this compositional approach is the opener "StreAM", which submerges the harmony in swelling electronic reverb and broad, sweet vocal melodies, able to evoke, within its suspended harmonic progression, both a kind of magical self-rediscovery and a childlike, Felliniesque return to the wonder of first experiences.

"Omnibus" drives the piano-led rhythm forward with percussion, luminous cascades of electronics and strangled brass tones bordering on fourth world music; an exuberance that "Float (Best Way To)" settles, bringing the listener back to metropolitan nights, amid footstep noises, hi-hat vibrations and chords doubled by distorted guitar. Similar atmospheres can be found in the following "All Gates", where toy piano and synths create contrasts between the urban and the pastoral.

"H. Who Are You?" is inspired by Heiner Müller's Horatio, and aims to show, through its dramatic accelerations and ecstatic choruses, the inner conflict of a human being (the mysterious H.) forced to choose between good and evil, aware that both dwell within his soul in equal measure, ineradicable.

In the end, it's a hallucinated journey inward and backward in time: "Back To 13" and "Huh Your Voice" seek out the painful heights of childhood, of the child who looks at his reflection for the first time and tries to recognize the signs of the humanity to come. The mystery of the voice shines through in the exuberant vocal counterpoint that the choruses offer the piano, embellished with samples of past recordings. "Push Back Song" (refined by the distant, reverberated voice of Any Other) and "Felix" explore solitude and abandonment, painting places emptied of human presence in which, nonetheless, a scar of pain remains. The piano is liquid and heavy, the choruses and the falling, weighty percussion creating a mournful melody that underwrites the severity of silence.

Closing the record is "H. You're Good", with its acidic, cutting electronic inserts and the unsettling distortion of the phrase "There's nothing that can't be stopped". The piano tries to emerge from the baroque interlacing of beats, synthesizers and guitar flangers; its sweet melody, lost within this sonic cruelty, seems to want, despite everything, to offer a timid song of hope, a search, within hell, for that which is not hell.

Comparable, in terms of genre proximity, to those names so overused they've become shorthand for the piano itself, Thomas Umbaca has nonetheless managed to find a voice of his own, delivering an evocative, nostalgic album - dreamlike and cinematic - that achieves what it sets out to do and enchants with its shifting mirages.

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26/05/2026