Falling Close to Memory

For the best part of two decades, Ezekiel Honig has worked a quiet seam between the deep micro-house of his Type 100 records and the home-recorded ambience that defines his Anticipate Recordings imprint. Falling Close to Memory is his first full-length collaboration with Irish vocalist Trevor De Nógla, and it finally lets those two worlds bleed into one another—six tracks in which muted techno pulse, field recordings and the human voice share one warm, unhurried space. Mastered by Kassian Troyer at Dubplates & Mastering, it is the most emotionally direct record Honig has made.

Opening track Genetic Memory sets the tone immediately. Across its four and a half minutes, a bed of dusty Rhodes chords and tape hiss slowly unfurls, De Nógla’s voice slipping in barely above a whisper—wordless, almost instrumental, dissolving back into the texture like a memory half-recalled. Close in the Distance is the record’s most rhythmic moment: a soft, four-to-the-floor pulse stirring beneath warm pads while the singer’s gentle falsetto stretches across the beat in a murmur that never quite becomes a melody.

The middle of the record is where Honig’s electroacoustic instincts come to the fore. Unseeing the Edits is the shortest piece, a collage of room tone and brushed percussion that sounds like a house waking up, whilst Falling & Clanging delivers the clatter its title promises—metallic percussion and stray field recordings circling a slow, submerged bassline. Both are pure texture, and both reward headphones.

Flatlands of a Paper Desert is the album’s most abstract stretch, a spacious drift in which an almost subliminal kick anchors organ-like pads and the pair’s voices surface like stray radio signals. Closer Whatever Else I Know is the closest thing to a conventional song: a sparse piano figure supporting De Nógla’s clearest, most exposed vocal, left to ring out over a slow fade that feels less like an ending than an exhale.

Nothing on Falling Close to Memory grabs the listener, and that is the point. Honig and De Nógla have made a record that rewards patience, one that sounds different on a good system and more intimate on headphones with every pass. It never feels like a pairing of two distinct talents so much as two voices that were always meant to share a room. Quiet, warm and quietly essential.