Drowse

Drowse is a long-running music project by Portland-based artist Kyle Bates. Running through Bates’ work is a heavy and tangible sense of fragility and hope.

Moving between ambient music, shoegaze and drone, drowse's songs are known for stitching together aching guitar lines and deconstructed ambient passages that glow with a pale gray light with heavy subject matter that delve into unflinching personal accounts of mental health and loss. Bate's’ pulls no punches in his songwriting, often bringing to the surface the various ways that trauma informs one’s life and the lives of those caught in its wake.

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Drowse is Portland, Oregon’s Kyle Bates, whose project has quite the discography. Indeed, the four tracks appended here are castoffs of sorts from “Light Mirror,” his latest album on The Flenser. Here he relies heavily on field recordings to flavor his dark ambient and shoegaze impulses, vehicles to perpetuate the emotional turmoil of life and loss. The thing is, Bates isn’t really one to wallow, no matter how hard he has to look at the subject matter of his songs. Instead, he faces these things that would cripple others emotionally and allows them to influence the work he does. The results are never less than fascinating, and often harrowing, but just as equally cautiously hopeful. For example, an ill omen blows through “Your Breath Is Wind” until it transforms under drowse’s watchful gaze into forward momentum, personal progress in the face of adversity.