Writing back in 2018 about the album Rains, we described how the music of Amparo, AKA Sweden-based musician and producer Lela Amparo, is a kind of situating force. Blending electronics and guitar, the melancholic yet lush soundscapes evoked a sense of the world at large, placing one’s own concerns into a wider context, and finding beauty in the sense of scale. Later that year came Palm House, an expansion of the meditative style that served as “something of a sonic journal.” The release introduced another side to Amparo, one capable of not just exploring space but time too, helping “to capture moments and memories that might otherwise be lost, preserving them in the fondest light.”
Out via Memoir Music, an imprint of Rotterdam label Chillhop Music, Amparo is back with a brand new EP, Lost Ghosts, a three-song release that perfects their style. As the title suggests, the EP is as concerned with the past as it is the present, possessing a kind of duality in its sound. Field recordings anchor the spatial side of the songs in the present, dripping rain and ambient echoes of opener ‘Unlisted’ evoking a calm solitude, but the instrumentation places the temporal dimension somewhere back in time. Lost Ghosts is therefore both an exercise in fond, nostalgic reflection and the quiet place in which to practice it.
Lost Ghosts is out now via Memoir Music and available from Bandcamp.