Darkness Is Just Darkness
Darkness Is Just Darkness is a collaborative album by Euan Alexander Millar-McMeeken and cellist Henrik Meierkord, presenting a stripped-back convergence of ambient music and spoken word. Intimate and unembellished, the record unfolds at a measured pace, allowing texture, silence, and language to carry equal weight.
The album’s music is written and constructed by Millar-McMeeken, whose previous work has consistently explored minimalism, repetition, and emotional directness. Here, those concerns are pushed further inward. Synths, drones, and understated harmonic shifts provide a fragile framework for Meierkord’s cello, which moves between sustained tones, uneasy scrapes, and mournful melodic fragments. Nothing feels decorative; every sound exists in service of mood and meaning.
Spoken passages—delivered in a plain, conversational register—recall the early work of Arab Strap, favouring restraint over drama and observation over narrative resolution. The words sit inside the music rather than on top of it, dissolving into the arrangements and re-emerging as another texture. The overall tone is reflective rather than confessional, suggesting accumulation over explanation.
In keeping with Millar-McMeeken’s broader catalogue, Darkness Is Just Darkness resists genre certainty. It shares an affinity with the slow-burn atmospheres and emotional patience associated with releases on Kranky yet remains grounded in a distinctly personal voice. Where earlier projects hinted at distance and abstraction, this album feels closer, quieter, and more resolved in its refusal to offer easy conclusions.
Rather than framing darkness as something to transcend, the album treats it as a neutral state—something to sit with, observe, and understand. The result is a record that rewards close listening and time, offering a space where ambiguity is not only allowed but essential.
Tracklisting:
- The Evening Seems So Distant
- All One Breath
- Shades Of Night
- Where Morning Broke
- Are You Restles
- Silence In The Dark
- An Hour Before Dawn
- Memory
- A Little Part Of This In Everyone
Euan Alexander Miller-McMeeken & Henrik Meierkord
Euan Alexander Millar-McMeeken is a multidisciplinary composer and artist known for projects under names like Glacis, Civic Hall and Yoal. His work often combines experimental sound, recorded environments, and reflective personal content creating music that balances introspection with clarity, inviting listeners into richly textured sonic spaces.
His work delves into darker, more experimental territory, focusing on mood, texture, and emotionally charged songwriting. His music stands as a progression shaped by exploration, honesty, and sustained creative growth.
Henrik Meierkord is a Swedish musician based in Stockholm, experimenting with different genres. With the cello as his main instrument, he also masters viola, double bass, guitar and numerous other instruments. Typically Henrik’s approach to composition tends to begin with the cello, before further layers of strings are added, such as double bass or violin. But often, he will create music intuitively and free from set rules; sometimes a piece of music can be started with a synthesiser or piano or written purely as an experiment.
As a composer, Henrik creates vivid, full-bodied pieces that draw as much from ambient music's meditative qualities as they do from humanity's rich history of classical styles. As a cellist, he injects emotion that is both relatable and intimate, across a diverse range of musical collaborations. With a work rate that is nothing short of astounding, Henrik continues to explore every possible expression of human feeling, from the heart-wrenching to the transcendental. And yet, a lightness and curiosity run throughout his process, with the sole aim to bring true benefit to the listener. His keywords in making music are pause, vacuum of time, the unconscious, consciousness, dream, meditation, a way of avoiding direct thoughts and reality. He combines Neoclassical approach with his string instruments and effects and sometimes together with synthesizers.
He has also previously released music on labels such as Ambientologist, Audiobulb, Projekt records, Ella ruth Institute and Subcontinental Records. Henrik began playing cello aged of 12, progressing to play in classical orchestras, onto performing in bands and then creating his own music. He has also collaborated and performed for artists such as Ossler, Pawel Kobak, Marco Lucchi, Meipr, Sole, Strulgattu, Agent Side Grinder, Knivtid and many other collaborations.
Reviews
TBA...