The title piece sets out his terms. Lacewing took six or seven harp samples, single notes chosen at random, and asked whether anything worth hearing could be built from so little. Plenty of producers would have quit by lunchtime. He has made something spacious and quietly stubborn, a piece that treats scarcity as an invitation. Limit a musician's materials and you often learn what they are made of, and Lacewing turns out to be made of patience.
His ancestors are no secret. Brian Eno's gift for making a room feel larger, Laraaji's shimmering, cleansing repetition and Julianna Barwick's choral vapours all drift through the music, as does Mary Lattimore's harp, which by his own admission started the whole business. Yet it never plays as homage. He borrows the calm of these artists without borrowing their fingerprints, and the harp, so often used as shorthand for heaven, is allowed to be what it physically is: strings, wood, a trembling in the air.
The trick at the centre of the opener is a neat one. A real harp and a synthesiser play precisely the same melody, and Lacewing blends them until the join disappears. You lean in to work out which shimmer is plucked and which is programmed, and you can't, which is the point. The organic and the synthetic stop arguing and start sharing a coat. Around them gather reverberating ouds, their long, wet tails smudging the edges of each phrase, and trippy synths that wobble and glow without showing off. Then come the voices: a Kenyan singer, sampled from a royalty-free library and now unnamed and untraceable, hovering through the mix like a half-remembered song from the next village over. Lacewing admits, with real tenderness, that he doesn't know who she is and hopes she might one day hear the piece and recognise herself. That small, unresolved ache seeps into the music. Her voice is a ghost with no address, and the track is better for the mystery.
The titles that follow read like a bedtime library for the restless: "Land Of Enchantment", "Night Of Whispers" and, to close, the lengthy, lantern-lit "The Moon, The Dark, The Perfumed Garden". Together they sketch a journey from dusk towards something nearer sleep, and the sequencing suits an artist who admits he starts every piece with little idea of where it will end. The mini-album's length is its quiet virtue. Four tracks is enough to establish a world and too few to outstay its welcome, a rare act of restraint in a genre that tends to confuse duration with depth.
Melancholy is the undertow here, never the cargo. The music soothes first and saddens second, and the sadness arrives late, like the realisation, halfway through a long bath, that the water has gone cold. It is music "for our troubled times", in the artist's own phrase, and it neither lectures nor escapes. It simply keeps you company.
Those who like ambient music to strike out for the horizon may wish for one more mutiny, a moment where the harp breaks ranks. But Lacewing's philosophy is to begin without knowing where he will end up, and the record keeps faith with that. Nothing is forced, and nothing is explained.
That matters. A drummer once told him "never explain", and he mulls the advice with a wry "possibly". Here the evidence is on his side. *Freedom From Forever* needs no footnotes, only a quiet room, decent headphones, and the willingness to let a handful of harp notes become an entire sky.
Lacewing doesn't play live, and on this showing he doesn't need to. The stage is wherever you happen to be lying down.