Lingua Lustra - Portal (2018)

Grass surely doesn’t grow under the feet of Albert Borkent, aka Lingua Lustra. In addition to running the Spiritech label (home to his own work and to colleagues operating within similar aesthetic ambient-initiated spheres), he apparently never sleeps, as releases both physical and digital have inundated the airspace across multiple platforms and on a myriad of labels in just a four-year span. Fortunately, the quality control maintained over his output remains high, as evidenced by this new long-player, Portal, another beauteous slab of hesitant, charcoal-gray ambientscapes. And truth be told, Borkent’s not just getting older, he’s getting better. Where many are content with MIDI presets and a dearth of imagination, Borkent mines the depths of his soundbanks down to its very circuit joins. There’s a grand majesty to the shifting sonic sands of “The Gates of Dawn” that suggests the bastion of a Steve Roach/Eno ethos while subjugating it entirely: the many differing pearlescent tones reveal hitherto untold layers when experienced either in the broader stereo space or through the captive audience of headphones. This isn’t music that is content with simply being ethereal—Borkent wishes to conjure wholly new windswept worlds and unmapped terrain, the sort of thing his Lingua Lustra project now regularly excels at.