Daniel Avery’s Into The Arms Of Stillness is the sound of an artist refusing to come down from a high. It arrives barely two months after Love + Light — the album that saw the London producer retreat from the song-led techno of Song for Alpha back into the immersive, experimental spaces of his earlier work, and one of the defining records of 2020, landing on end-of-year lists at Resident Advisor and Pitchfork alike. This three-track EP, released via Phantasy Sound, is his first new music since, and it reads as a deliberate coda: the A-side pairs directly with Love + Light’s Lone Swordsman, while the whole record stretches that album’s most enveloping qualities into new shapes.
Title track Into The Arms Of Stillness is the EP’s centrepiece — nearly six minutes of drone-trance drift in which a patient four-to-the-floor pulse barely disturbs the surface of a vast, humming soundscape. The bassline is a low, glacial swell rather than a hook, while pads decay slowly into one another, trailing clouds of reverb that never quite clear. Nothing about it rushes; it’s the kind of track that rewards headphones and closed eyes, its layers accumulating imperceptibly until the whole thing glows — a slow, tidal build that is quietly masterful.
Into The Arms Of Stillness was Daniel Avery's first new music since Love + Light.
Into The Voice Of Stillness takes the same chord figure and gives it a sturdier, more percussive frame — the drums sit higher in the mix, the acid squelch buries deeper, and the whole piece feels closer to the dancefloor without ever quite committing to it. And then comes Petrol Blue, the outlier and the immediate highlight: a proper acid-techno banger written, by Avery’s own account, in a beachside studio. The 303 is front and centre, its rubbery squelch locked into a tight, rolling groove that snaps the record back into focus after so much weightlessness. It’s the most direct and physical thing here, and all the more striking for the company it keeps.
Into The Arms Of Stillness is a slim record — three tracks, fifteen minutes — but a complete one. The title pair cement the drone-trance language Avery spent 2020 perfecting, while Petrol Blue proves his club muscle hasn’t atrophied in the process. Arriving at the tail end of a year that belonged to him, it’s a compact, essential chapter — confirmation that Love + Light wasn’t a peak but a foundation.
