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.
Video by Ralf Moussa
The narrative takes on the process of ice melting during this time of the year. As in both realistic and abstract notions and forms, the visual aims to
embody a parallel from the geological nature on how ice melts. How the war blowing into my country Lebanon has exposed bigger areas of debate on notions of not only morality, but strength of character, opinionation, distress and relief. Where this visual work exposes the chaotic in correlation to order.
Silence in the Dark resolves, in one having the same attributes in the shadows as for under the spotlight not keeping no war alter ones character between war and peace. Noise and calm. The same thought/deed orientation. In colour as in dark black and white.
Ralph Moussa – www.ralfmoussa.art
Reviews
Moonbuilding
I’m a big fan of Euan Alexander Miller-McMeeken. You should be too. I’ve been writing about him for a little while after being pointed in his direction by Alex over at quiet details. Here’s the skinny if you’re playing catch up. It all circles around Euan’s own Sleep In The Fire label. There’s a debut album, ‘All The Weather Of The Human Heart’ from June 2024, which we called “a gentle whisper of a record”. There’s ‘Framed Insects’ from last May, of which we said, “the songs sit on top, but underneath there’s pops and crackles like you’re playing it on over-loved vinyl. There’s electrical buzzes everywhere, and fizzes and hums”. In between those two releases there was a collaborative record with US-based multidisciplinary artist Jesse Narens as Bird Battles.
There’s a theme developing here. Artist album, collaboration, artist album… it’s time for a collaboration! On ‘Darkness Is Just Darkness’, Euan teams up with Stockholm-based multi-instrumentalist Henrik Meierkord. Those instruments include cello, viola, double bass, guitar and, apparently, many more. And the genres he works are multiple too. There’s some helpful tags in the accompanying notes – ambient, electronic, psycho-acoustic, microsound, modern classical. I must look up microsound, I think I would probably like that.
‘Darkness Is Just Darkness’ is described as “a stripped-back convergence of ambient music and spoken word”. I like that it’s described as resisting “genre certainty”. It’s ambient like Field Lines Cartographer is ambient. It has the feel of one of those film soundtrack albums that sits on its own, separate from the film. Like ‘Paris, Texas’ or ‘Birdie’. There’s dialogue throughout, which only adds to the cinematic vibrations.
The spoken work comes in a gentle Scottish burr, which I assume is Euan. It reminds me of Bill Drummond’s spoken word section in The KLF’s ‘Build A Fire’. “We’ll stop for lunch / In some taco bar / Lee Marvin on the jukebox / Wandering Star’. Except musically this is very much at the other end of the spectrum. Underneath the spoken word on opener ‘The Evening Seems So Distant’ there’s a background of radio interference, distant shortwave chatter, a fuzz of white noise, with minimal piano and heaves of cello. The noise builds to quite a crescendo before it clicks off leaving just the delicate music. On ‘Are You Restless’ there’s even some singing. Sort of singing. It sounds like a fever dream or a blurry ‘Twin Peaks’ reality. It’s really tinny, distorted almost.
Henrik’s contributions are always equal to the challenge and lend a richness to the sound, as strings tend to do. The notes talk about how the music lends “a fragile framework for Meierkord’s cello, which moves between sustained tones, uneasy scrapes, and mournful melodic fragments”. It’s at the fore on ‘When Morning Broke’, the cello dancing over a sustained deep drone, but everywhere you look/listen you’ll hear it. I like the crackly closer ‘A Little Part Of This In Everyone’. I’ve said this before about Euan’s music, I think it’s my old speakers playing up, but it’s not. I love that. This is excellent, which is rapidly becoming the default setting for Euan Alexander Miller-McMeeken.
Original review > HERE
The Letter
Tamed and tempered darkness
Following their bleakly beautiful album We Gape and We Are Healed from earlier this year, Euan Alexander Millar-McMeeken (then working under his Glacis alias) and Henrik Meierkord are back with a second collaboration called Darkness Is Just Darkness. And it’s another dark album. With Millar-McMeeken’s creepy spoken words (think: a penitent Jigsaw with a Scottish accent) accompanying five of the nine tracks, it’s more mindful than contemplative but, like the Gaspar Claus release, Meierkord’s masterful cello playing offsets the crepuscular with a semblance of stark hope. And while the vocal tracks are noticeably grainier in comparison to the others, there’s a sense of space, vast and safe, prevalent in both that unites the disparate contributions; like scenes of a film, interchanging moments of contemplation and ongoing narrative. Light emerges from the gloom on closing track A Little Part Of This In Everyone when Millar-McMeeken’s words ascend to song.
Original review > HERE