We first mentioned composer Yuri Tománek back in 2016, writing about his electronica project Drowning by Numbers. “[‘The Ground Before Him’] is a down-tempo ambient track shrouded in melancholy and loneliness,” we wrote of the song that had appeared on Netflix documentary Last Chance U, “sounding like the world as half-heard from within the head of someone occupied by their own business.”
Yuri Tománek does a lot of work for films and scores, both under the Drowning by Numbers moniker and his own name. The latter tends to be used for a piano-based minimalism, and Tománek’s classical training shows through in the subtle nuances that create the striking and spacious soundscapes. New EP In the End is the perfect illustration of this, a lesson in the power of restraint and delicate care.
The EP opens with ‘In the end, we all fade away’, a song that lives up to the existential title through a kind of quiet weight. Here, the spaces between the notes are as important as the notes themselves, loss and longing woven into every aspect of the track. The relatively short length belies the impact of the sound, though the abrupt end to the build feels pertinent to the themes too, the song fading away before you’re ready to let go.
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‘1st of October’ stirs from a similarly minimal piano, though unfurls into a wider ambient sound. There is a prudence to the atmosphere, Tománek never allowing the stirring mood to ever quite reach its climax, and the threat of this only reinforces the simplicity and control. ‘I have no more to give’ is warmer and softer still, and after the existential predecessors feels like calm after the storm, as though having past through to some other side, or else looking back at what has been with with renewed fondness.
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In the End is out now and available from the Yuri Tománek Bandcamp page.