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At some point in childhood, everyone realizes they’re floating on a planet in space and that a whole ocean of space and time exists beyond the world in which they live—which, to a kid, seems infinite and unknowable already. Daryl Groetsch’s new album, Prophecy, embodies this youthful fascination while serving as a great capstone to the enviable run of music he’s released already over the past two years.
Groetsch is best known as prolific Portland ambient artist Pulse Emitter, renowned for sparkling synth music and yawning chasms of drone. But since 2022, he’s put out nine albums of “pure space music” under his own name on Bandcamp. Most of them were released as part of a pair, one album lighter and more uplifting, the other darker and more insinuating. (Home Again and Beige World, the first such pair, from January 2022, embody this contrast in their very names.)
Prophecy is the first album in the series not released with a sibling, and it stands slightly apart from the rest. First of all, while the rest of Groetsch’s releases are 40 minutes long, this one is only 30—short enough to call an EP, if Groetsch had decided to, though such distinctions seem irrelevant for a release coming out in digital form only.
While the others feel like glimpses into alternate universes, Prophecy flickers like a small flame and is quickly snuffed out. It might not be long enough to inspire the reverie of the longer Groetsch albums, but it holds up to repeated plays. For purely functional purposes, it works in a pinch during a short bus ride or a cat nap. Also, it was recorded 25 years ago, as the artist’s first stab at making the kind of ambient drift music he would hear in the family garage late at night as his father tinkered with his car and listened to the NPR ambient program Hearts of Space (which turns 50 this year).
In this music, we can hear everything Groetsch has made, and though his debut, Slem, in 2002 was a fairly generic collection of sounds then au courant in electronic music, Prophecy acts as proof that this music is where his heart lay all along. If not for a slight difference in audio fidelity, it would be impossible to tell the album was made at a different time than the music he’s making now.
Groetsch’s sensibilities as a classically trained musician are intact, and his eccentric chord choices and willingness to vacillate between dissonance and stunning beauty give this music an emotional depth uncommon in music so simple and placid. This is true of Groetsch’s newer albums as well, particularly Home Again.
Prophecy rivals that album’s ability to inspire awe with little more than a standard New Age choir-synth preset. This is not simply the sound of someone ruminating on one chord until they get bored, but someone who’s memorized a lot of classical pieces and understands how to elicit emotional reactions with specific harmonic choices.
Though the tracks on Prophecy were recorded decades ago, it’s remarkable how much some of them sound like music that would come later. “We Are Made of Star Stuff” hinges on a chord progression not unlike that on New Age doyenne Julianna Barwick’s 2011 track “The Magic Place,” and “Toward Grey Clouds” suggests the short interstitials that Boards of Canada place on their albums. Perhaps both artists listened to Hearts of Space as well when they were kids—or maybe they’re all tapping into the same fundamental, platonic ideal of space music.
A distaste for New Age, ambient, and otherwise soothing music such as this is the byproduct of cynicism. Kids rebel against their parents and adopt transgression as a defense, and thus comes the embrace of louder music: rock, hip-hop, punk, metal. But to listeners who can experience the same starry-eyed spirit of exploration as a young Groetsch investigating the strange sounds coming from his parents’ garage, this music might feel deeply nostalgic—a callback to our childhood fascinations, maybe even to that elusive netherworld in which we all existed before we were born.