From Overseas : Thinking Like A Mountain

From Overseas (aka Kévin Séry) makes the kind of bold, engaging, and ethereal music you can’t help but get lost in. Like some crystalline forest in a dream, you’re surrounded by a beauty not quite tangible. As if thoughts and visions form from the subconscious in rays of light and wonder, not quite able to touch but you feel it deeply nonetheless.

Kévin Séry has been releasing thoughtful, heady ambient music for years now. He released the first From Overseas record Home back in 2020 with Past Inside The Present. Since then he’s collaborated with everyone from zakè to Benoît Pioulard to awakened souls to City of Dawn, as well as being a part of the epic Live At The Gothic Chapel along with zakè, Marc Ertl and James Bernard.

After five years we now have From Overseas follow-up to Home, the beautiful and shimmering Thinking Like a Mountain. Thinking Like a Mountain is a moving and personal piece of music that moves the immovable. It’s haunting in the best way possible, like a sunrise over a wooded landscape. Or the first cry of a newborn baby. In the times we are currently navigating, Thinking Like a Mountain is the auditory equivalent of a low, embracing whisper saying “Breathe. Just breathe.”

According to Past Inside The Present, “the main threads weaving through these eight pieces are Séry’s experience as a new father and his graduate studies in Environmental Philosophy, both of which infuse the album’s sound with the kind of awestruck humility usually reserved for gazing up at timeless, cloud-draped peaks.”

“Awestruck humility” feels right to describe this record. Listening to opener “Appalaches” you experience a weight in the subtle rhythmic build. Melodies escape a chasm which feels as big as those aforementioned mountains. An absolute hopefulness rises up in the sonic structures that bring to mind artists like Vangelis, Mark Isham, and even Tangerine Dream in their brighter moods. “Breathe” sounds like the universe waking from some long, existential dream, blooming in some flower-like cosmic lucidity. It’s overwhelming and wondrous. “Howl of a Wolf, For E.”(written for Kevin Séry’s infant son) feels draped in the hopes and dreams a father possesses for their child. A world wide open, and possibilities with plenty of space for blooming.

These eight songs that cover the whole of Thinking Like a Mountain never waver in their optimism. From the sun-soaked air of “Le Secret Des Dunes” to the overcast mood of “For Ourselves We Grieve” to the lilting resolve in album closer “Infinite”, From Overseas gives us a journey of life and light. A naked and emotional experience that sums up what we’re here to do on this rock, and that is live the best we can. Take it all in, the good and bad, and make some sort of cosmic sense from it. Let Thinking Like a Mountain be your guidebook.