---

---

Houses (with things that’ve died)

Rooms Without Doors

---

It sounds like a tape left degraded in the basement storage, losing itself a little more each year.

The ephemeral quality to Rooms Without Doors, “Houses (with things that’ve died),” is transfixing. A meditative listen across an hour that you wash into. This ambient album stretches its industrial tones into a worn-down hum that tunes into its own frequencies. It’s an album that feels haunted, with plunderphonic memories transmuted into a ghostly deterioration. A frozen soundscape that tilts into the mournful, processing its grief across its runtime as it comes back down to earth.

“A Ghost Departs” begins in a warped drone that falls in and out of sound. Holding the opening until halfway in, a song fades into the mix. An empyreal tone washes through a bending guitar, strings plucked so the metallic buzz rings out. The melancholy is infused with the transcendent, the way a snowy winter night can feel both desolate and comforting.

“Frostbite (windless)” is a more submerged track, in which its guitar loop floats a slurred jangle across its play. Followed by the harsher, “Burning Survival,” which grates in its forward and reversed components lopsidedly mixed into the right channel. “Black sky” falls further into the dread as the abstracted soundscape buzzes around the frame. Eventually locking into a clicked rhythm with the chords of an organ, only to degrade once more into an alien distortion.

The album comes up again in the track, “A place of shelter,” which sounds like the track that would signal a survival horror game’s safe space. A moment of respite, its clocklike backing follows the tape loop of a soft melody. A slow digital tear infects the song as it rises into an ethereal tone.

“Visiting lost friends in dreams” holds in a dreary hollow that “I worry for tomorrow” expands further into an expansive reverberation. The sonic weight of the production creates a totalizing soundscape that’s hypnotic. The spatial sequencing is sharpened into a refined and harsh track on “Fixed Signal.” Evoking a dissonance between two worlds lost in communication. There is a grief here for the worlds, objects, and people that have been lost.

“Heavenly choir isn’t calling yet” comes in with a bouncy, round bass that baubles into a hauntingly empty track. “Pray for them (two dead birds)” similarly opens with a warbled clicking, but instead fades into a track simultaneously angelic and material. Bird song is layered softly into the soundscape to create a more earthly grounding, signaling a shift in the album’s tone. No longer about what is lost, but what is present.

“Houses (with things that’ve died)” is one of those listening experiences you put on to feel things out. A moment to let your mind wander around its hallways in grief, sorrow, and ultimately acceptance. It’s an album that bares its emotions, caught in the weight of the world but continuing onward. Rooms Without Doors’ incredible production makes this album a fantastic work of ambient. A long listen that reminds you to breathe and feel through your feelings, and to come out the other end a little more comforted. 

With the short transitional static of, “Broken signal, part 2 (it’s almost over, you can breathe),” the final track begins. “Little kids can’t play (with things that’ve died)” sounds like a home video that was accidentally taped over. The sounds of skateboard wheels on the sidewalk creates a nostalgic soundscape, elevated further by a playful piano and brushed drum loop. It’s a track peopled with life. After a long listen across this heavy and cold album, the sun begins to crack through to lift the clouds away.

---