Review: Underwater Sleep Orchestra - Other Sides of Nowhere

Artist: Underwater Sleep Orchestra

Album: Other Sides of Nowhere

Label: Cryo Chamber

Release date: August 2025

Regular readers of this website will know by now that I tend to get unreasonably excited by collaborations. Whether it's a one-off album or an entire side project, there's something incredibly alluring about the concept of two people woving their creative flows into a separate, standalone whole in a genre that's solitary and introverted by definition. Such is the case with Underwater Sleep Orchestra, whose beautifully evocative name conceals two well-known personae in the dark ambient scene: Pär Boström of Kammarheit and Bruce Moallem of God Body Disconnect. Unlike their main projects that belong to rather divergent strains of dark ambient, Underwater Sleep Orchestra offered a very unified vision on the two albums released under that moniker so far, one lost halfway between reality and the dream world, wrapped in warm analogue drones, and really emphasising the ambient part of the artists' creative canvas.

The project's third album that's hot off the press, Other Sides of Nowhere, pushes the envelope of this sound even further, or rather, manages to conjure the dreamlike atmosphere better than ever. The mood is set before you even play the album, owing to the fantastic cover art courtesy of Simon Heath. The country road leading into the foggy woods at dusk, the VHS noise across the picture, and the irreverent pink lettering all combine into an irresistible feeling of time rather than place; the actual photo could have been taken anywhere, but the setting is unmistakably sometime in the late 80s, representing the last gasp of an analogue age that produces such a heartwarming feeling of nostalgia even in those who don't necessarily remember it. It's precisely this sense of nostalgia - in rough terms, somewhere between Twin Peaks and Stranger Things - that Other Sides of Nowhere is constructed upon. The sound itself could hardly be simpler: echoing synths, reverberating strings and looping drones, all wrapped in that beautiful analogue hum, in short sequences rarely going over the five-minute mark. And yet, as with all great works of art, the result is much more than the sum of its parts; the sheer range of moods and settings that Pär and Bruce have been able to paint with this limited number of tools at their disposal is staggering. In just over 40 minutes of total running time, I caught myself completely lost in thought multiple times, whether due to the tracks being so associative with other works and types of art, or because I myself was transported to childhood memories, scents and sounds. Singling out individual tracks for analysis would be a pointless exercise, but I found Night Spirals and The Nowhere to be particularly poignant examples of the quality of work showcased here, while the closing track Home is Where You Left Your Ghost offers a few surprises of its own.

While Other Sides of Nowhere doesn't reinvent the musical wheel in any way, it is a strikingly powerful expression of its subgenre that has plenty to offer to existing aficionados, but just as importantly, could also be a great recruiting tool for wider audiences as well, due to its accessible and culturally relevant nature. It's some of the finest compositional and arrangement work that either Pär or Bruce have produced so far (and I do not say this lightly!), and it comes as a perfect counterpoint to the futuristic space-oriented dark ambient that seems to be prevalent these days. I just hope this isn't the last we've seen from this project, for our collective sakes.

Rating: 9/10