The new album, mastered by the legendary Kramer features a unique mixture of Eastern and Western musical stylings and instrumentation exploring themes that are sometimes deeply personal, spiritual and otherworldly
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voyage au soleil
Their 2020 debut
Includes the singles “Tranquility Base”, “First Steps”, and the title track “Voyage Au Soleil”.
The album features Bob Holmes (of ambient country pioneers, SUSS) , composer Joel Mellin and multi-instrumentaliust Christopher Romero (both from Gamelan Dharma Swara) who have combined their influences to create a unique blend of Eastern and Western psychedelia.
The debut from this instrumental trio has the air of a purifying ritual, blending psychedelia with a loose-limbed minimalism.
“
blending the opiated psychedelia of Brightblack Morning Light with a loose-limbed minimalism that privileges subtle effects and incremental chord progressions.“
Pitchfork
September 2020
Dave Segal
SUSS And numün Find Hope In The “High Lonesome” Of Ambient Country
“a pop-up book — you think you know what’s going to happen, but then all of a sudden a page opens, and everything just comes to life in a sort of 3-D manner.”
Stereogum
Arielle Gordon
November, 2020
Numün's 'voyage au soleil' Is a Trippy, Ambient Ride and Ambitious Debut
“This inventive trio pulls off the neat trick of creating music that evokes space travel while also sounding refreshingly grounded to Earth's atmosphere. Holmes, Mellin, and Romero possess an uncanny knack for creating a musical climate that perfectly encapsulates the mood of humans in space – full of wonder, fear, and spine-tingling trepidation”
PopMatters
October, 2020
Chris Ingalls
Lift Off!
They’ve created a deep ambient album inspired by the 50th anniversary of the moon landing. John Diliberto counts down to liftoff.
Echoes
“Their collaboration is simultaneously foreboding and captivating… conjures the appropriate mix of trepidation and awe.”
The Best Ambient Music on Bandcamp 2020
“Unlike virtually anything else recorded today, voyage au soleil by numün is a truly haunting recording of acoustic and electronic instruments. Incorporating traditional Balinese and Americana instrumentation plus synthesizers and loop manipulation.“
Spectrum Culture
September 2020
Bob Fish
"It’s ambient, it’s soundscape, it’s collage and more, and I personally find this kind of thing a balm during these chaotic times. Voyage au Soleil is a deeply satisfying listening experience."
A Green Man Review
October, 2020
In a year of music typified by anxious navel-gazing, this tranquil and absorbing set keeps calling me back.
KUTX 98.9
Tous les deux mois, Maxime s'enfonce au coeur de la jungle indé, pour vous en ramener les plus beaux spécimens.
Rectangle
Maxime Wathieu
October, 20
"It’s cosmic music for people who would never, ever coin anything ‘cosmic,’ and slow jams for campers who prefer the outdoors to an El Cosmico tent in Marfa. In a word, it’s authentic, which is a horrifying thing to call anything of genuine value or meaning because of the way that word has become its opposite, but numün makes me believe in a lot of shit I didn’t even know existed. Authenticity lives!"
The Passion of Weiss
September 2020
Will Schube
"one might think that we are dealing here with an album released in the 70s, in the middle of the psychedelic hippie period. But over the titles and listening we quickly realize that finally ”Voyage au Soleil” , the first album of the New York trio Numün is indeed a record of today and above all that it turns out to be totally unclassifiable."
Possible Musics
September 2020
"a dedication to gradual expansion that underscores the trio’s ambient-psych background. "
Vinyl District
September 2020
Joseph Neff
“Numün’s sound has a clean warmth and their debut lp is full of dramatic, cinematic atmospheres which leave room for the listener to conjure their own narratives. Though inspired by mankind’s journey to Earth’s nearest celestial neighbor, voyage au soleil suggests flights even farther out into the cosmos”
Aquarium Drunkard
September 2020
K.Fortinsky
voyage au soleil is an epic journey in which each member brings his own creative stylings, combining to make a piece of music unlike much else out there...feels like a curious space walk, with Eno ambiance lifting into a bouncing rhythm...would not be out of place if plugged right into side A of Dark Side of the Moon.
Deepest Currents
September 2020
Nathan Paul Yoder
You wouldn’t even really call it fourth world music, despite the exotic nature of their instrumentation as they’re not aping styles or appropriating cultures, everything is in slave to their own unique, gentle low key vision. In this sense it’s almost instrumental folk music with the odd exotic or sound design flourish. It has this incredible way of providing a kind of blanket soothing that you can drift away to but periodically you focus back in, and during these moments it feels positively transcendent.
Cyclic Defrost
September 2020
Bob Baker Fish
With voyage au soleil, numün introduce themselves as a force that is capable of channeling the ineffable and intrinsic features of life into musical composition. By fusing long careers that span a great breadth of genres, the group finds common ground in the instrumental description of feeling. East or West, Gamelan or bluegrass, we all share the experience of feeling our emotions shift as we listen to a passing storm or a rushing river. This is the thesis of voyage au soleil.
Slug Magazine
September 2020
Austin Beck-Dross
Over its run time, the project offers a disparate blend of cosmic soundscapes, western and eastern psychedelia, and computer music, creating an intense, ever-revolving atmosphere of mutating shapes, colors and sounds
Riffs & Rhymes
September 2020
Roberto Johnson
I am always on the hunt for atmospheric journey records that are simultaneously cosmic and earthy, accessible and sophisticated, delightful and pensive, trippy and subtle and more analog than not. It’s a high bar—heh, heh, he said high—but I am happy to report that Voyage au Soleil, the first release of a downtown New York trio called Numün, soars beyond the limit.
The Burning Shore
September 2020
Erik Davis
Numün are not the kind of trio that you can slap a descriptor on that fits ever so nicely. There is a fusion that goes on within their music that can include anything from Electronic, Post Rock, Americana, Ethnographic, Prog Rock, Ambient and anything in between.
Drifting, Almost Falling
September 2020
“We always enjoy hearing some of the rarer instruments in music, and numün satisfies our need with gender wayang, theremin, dholak, cümbüş and many more on the spacious voyage au soleil.”
A Closer Listen
Sept, 2020
postrockcafe
Voyage Au Soleil, is a story of finding your bearings in unfamiliar territory: the tremolo twang juxtaposed against the strident cümbüş combine as if David Lynch’s Twin Peaks were set on the far side of the moon.”
Tinnitist
August 2020
Darryl Sterdan
Complex Distractions
August 12, 2020
J. Hubner
“I’m not sure how something can sound both dusty and jangly, while also sounding ethereal and otherworldly, but “First Steps” does it. Imagine if Ry Cooder, Brian Eno, and William Tyler all came together under East Coast stars and pressed upon the universe to give them a cosmic splash of inspiration.”
Independent Clauses
July 24, 2020
Stephen Carradini & Lisa Whealy
“it’s an organically-built, slow-moving wall of sound that creates a dense, full atmosphere -a dense, enveloping experience with some slight eastern overtones through an instrumental choice.”
Voyage Au Soleil “taps into the VHS membrane lifting the listener through a lost timeline. The album itself is a trip out past the pollution haze into the spatial luminescence and right into the superexploding sun”
Paperblog
July 23, 2020
Eli Jace
Tinnitist
July 2020
Darryl Sterdan
“I was in high school all over again looking for my long lost bong.”