Angela Winter : Forbidden Questions In Space

There’s something both beautiful and foreboding listening to the new long player by ambient/electronic artist Angela Winter. There’s a persistent hum that emanates throughout her Past Inside The Present debut titled Forbidden Questions In Space that affects you on a visceral level. As if some universal hum is reaching out from a vast and ancient darkness, attempting to make contact; a crack in the fabric of time and space reveals some omniscient entity wanting to share an endless millennia of knowledge and truth with us.

Angela Winter’s music and musical artistry is described as “Ambient, ritual, and experimental music for thresholds, where synths, keys, and strings meet otherworldly vocals, shimmering drones, and resonant overtones.” The description is apropos, as the instrumentation shares equal billing with Winter’s ghostly, shimmering vocals that echo endlessly through the album. It gives everything a very ritualistic feeling, as if stumbling across some ancient process of becoming one with the universe. Wordless questions to the great beyond, and throughout the record’s runtime and 8 musical works, answers might be revealed.

Music is a portal. It’s a portal to experiences, emotions, memories locked inside the subconscious waiting to be brought forth and experienced again. Childhood trips, high school heartaches, loss, love, or an evening overlooking a sunset on the shores of Lake Michigan; music is the key that unlocks those past experiences. Music can also be a portal to the unknown. It opens your mind and allows visions and ideas to form for the first time. It can be the paints, brushes, and canvas for the visions your imagination comes up with. Angela Winter’s Forbidden Questions In Space is a portal to new visions, ideas, and worlds. Deep and organic, it is a musical trip into the unknown.

“erthe” is the entry point; a humming, reverberating eight-minute journey into the vast unknown. A droning hum is the through line we follow; a zip line into the sonic center of this track. Angela Winter’s crystalline vocals hang in the stars, like on a clear night as we look above in awe. We lay, backs to the earth, and connect the dots of our existence. “stars were falling” and “truth-crashing” are cosmic minuets which lead us to “dark adaptation”. A slow swirl of sound and intention as vocals seem to emanate from an existential chasm. It’s a mix of cosmic dread and existential indifference, as if looking into the void and feeling little more than “This is it.”

“what the heart knows” is eerie and meditative as the seven and a half minute runtime is dominated by echoing vocals, as if communicating with a force far beyond our imagination. “Saturn, lightly” is an 8-minute whirl of caustic sound, as if some intergalactic gong was hit and the emanating noise travels light years. “awakeners” closes the journey, bringing to mind some ancient ritual which summons answers to questions we’ve long forgotten in past lives.

Angela Winters’ Forbidden Questions In Space is not for the musical passerby. This is a heady sound experience meant to be meditated on. This isn’t background noise for the everyday chit chat. It’s meant to bring up visceral feelings, and as a vehicle which to take a true journey in.

Out now via Past Inside The Present. Buy it here.