The New York-based producer’s ambient dub techno has a sublime glow, even when it’s just drifting in place.
Eden Aurelius is a relatively recent arrival to New York’s underground club scene, but her slim discography so far shows remarkable focus. With the exception of an early, techno-leaning compilation track that pushed to the center of the dancefloor, virtually everything she has put out so far has used the tools of dance music to carve out a space of sanctuary, pairing hypnotic dub rhythms with billowing ambient chords.
Aurelius’ reference points are familiar: artists like Deepchord, Vladislav Delay, Topdown Dialectic, and fellow travelers Purelink, who turned up as remixers on the New York-based producer’s debut EP, Plateau, in 2024. (She and Purelink’s Kindtree, aka Ben Paulson, teamed up on 24 exceptionally blissful minutes of phosphorescent swells earlier this year under the name Ring, an alias redolent of loops, bells, and friendship.) Aurelius’ fealty to classic dub techno makes her a good fit for Sheffield’s Short Span label, which has contributed to a revival of the sound with recent releases from Sa Pa, Mammo, K Wata, and Picture. Compared to her labelmates, though, Aurelius takes a more atmospheric approach. Why dance, she seems to say, when you can melt?
While recording Plateau, Aurelius said that she “became obsessed with this vast open feeling—being at a point where everything is colliding together and forming in front of you.” That glimpse of the sublime fuels all six tracks on Entre Nous, a succinct but immersive intensification of the foggy, ruminative sound she explored on Plateau. It’s right there in the initial moments of opener “Acquiescence,” where whooshing chords churn like seafoam, and plunging bass tones underscore the tidal rhythm; the track’s movements gesture at forces unseen, and maybe ungraspable. Aurelius’ tangled arrays of filters and delays lend a hall-of-mirrors quality to her sounds, which rise up out of the murk without ever revealing where they’ve come from. There’s rarely anything as straightforward as a kick drum, a hi-hat, or even a bassline here; instead, everything is smeared, all origins occulted in a thicket of echoes and reflections.
Entre Nous frequently summons an unusually tactile sound: The high end is as wispy as someone’s hair brushing against your cheek, and the bass, turned up loud enough, is chest-rattling. There’s little sense of forward motion in these tracks, but even when simply drifting in place, the blend of atmosphere and physicality—sunset glow meets seismic throb—is payoff enough. Focus your listening on the depths of the title track, and it comes to seem alive with movement, an almost imperceptible whirlwind of whispers and chirps. I’m reminded of a recent hike in a seemingly silent forest where I cupped my hands behind my ears and was suddenly confronted with a sensation I can only describe as a buzzing omnipresence, an explosion of life revealing itself in the movements of the air.
Aurelius uses similar techniques across the record, which lends to a certain sameyness by the end, though the tracks’ varied tempos, each one plotted at a different point on the downtempo spectrum, help offset any stagnation. And on “Ion,” a collaboration with Pontiac Streator, she shows a welcome degree of versatility. It starts off sounding like the most minimalist of the album’s tracks, bass and high-end fizz sketching out a loping rhythm that resembles brushed jazz drumming. Soon, though, the musicians fill in the midrange with blushing chords and a bell-tone melody that pulls gently away from the root note, creating a gentle tension. And then something unexpected happens: A four-on-the-floor kick drum materializes, magnetically rearranging the song’s moving parts into elegantly rolling techno. It’s the only time on the record that Aurelius explicitly invokes the dancefloor, but rather than seeming opposed to the rest of her work, it feels like an extension of that “vast open feeling” she invokes—a snapshot of forces colliding in rapturous slow motion.
