Haarvöl have always seemed like time-travelers in reverse: instead of racing toward the future, they slow it down, dissolve it, leave it to drip into pools where sound lingers like dew on glass. “Horizons of Suspended Zones”, their new release on Crónica, is very much in this spirit – a refusal to obey the tempo of modernity, a gentle sabotage of the world’s insistence on speed, excess, and constant distraction.
Here, the Portuguese collective distill their methods to something almost monastic. Six “zones”, each a space of resistance, built not from spectacle but from the bare essentials of tone, silence, and repetition. The trio recorded these sessions in the summer and autumn of 2024 without the usual post-production gloss: what we hear is what they played, nothing more. It’s almost an ascetic gesture, as if they are reminding us that the most radical sound in 2025 might simply be the one that refuses to hide behind trickery.
“Zone One [stay]” and “Zone Out [unfamiliarly cozy]” unfold like rooms whose walls are slowly breathing. Drones bend and hover, but they never rush; they wait for you to meet them. “Zone Zero [nameless]” and “Zone Lessness [with Beckett]” are even more uncompromising: slow-motion atmospheres that feel like they’re unraveling the concept of time itself, while whispering that this unraveling is the only true freedom left. By the time “Zone Warming [hidden]” closes the album, we are not quite sure whether we’ve been lulled into stasis or trained to perceive duration anew.
Haarvöl’s references to Hakim Bey and Cage are not academic posturing but lived practice. These “suspended zones” aren’t utopias in the usual sense – more like temporary shelters against a culture addicted to immediacy. They are not spectacular, and that’s the point: they ask you to sit, to endure, to listen, and to realize that simplicity itself can be infinitely complex.
Is it ambient? Minimalism? A protest against Spotify-friendly brevity? Maybe all at once. “Horizons of Suspended Zones” is less an album than a proposition: that in a world chasing novelty with rabid impatience, to sustain a single tone, to linger in silence, to stay—this might be the most radical gesture of all. Vito Camarretta
via Chain DLK