Wind moves through pine trees, water settles against a lakeshore, and a single piano figure returns to the same few notes with quiet patience. On A Gentle Escape, Niclas Lundqvist builds eight instrumental pieces from field recordings gathered at his family’s summer house on Sweden’s Småland coast, an undeveloped stretch of shoreline he has returned to for years. Recorded largely through analogue gear and pedal effects, the album pairs slow-moving synth pads with sparse piano and birdsong, tracing a different mood in each piece, from the steady, sunlit optimism of the title track to the meandering, half-dreamed close of the final track.
