Hilgrove Kenrick and Nick Norton-Smith both come to Sylph with long résumés in film, television, and stage music, but their collaboration moves in a different direction. Kenrick, a composer with credits ranging from 12 Monkeys to classical commissions, has also carved space for solo piano work and ambient explorations. Norton-Smith, a multi-instrumentalist and composer, has worked across West End productions, documentary scores, and international tours. Together they strip away the usual visual anchoring of soundtrack work to create something suspended and slow-moving, closer to the ambient lineage of Brian Eno than to the narrative push of a score.
The title track sets the tone: wide beds of synth and soft orchestral pads, a woody, almost ethnic-leaning lead line drifting in and out, never pressed into melody so much as placed into air. Nymph carries the same voice-like tone but leaves it more sparse, the spaces filled later with piano figures that give the track a reflective pull. Salamander stretches further into stillness, its pads occasionally broken by low strings that slide in beneath the surface. Undine returns to a wood-toned lead, threading through the haze as if echoing something half-remembered.
The consistency between pieces makes Sylph feel less like a sequence of tracks and more like four rooms in the same building. Each one changes the light slightly — a new instrument here, a chordal shift there: but the atmosphere holds. There are no sudden turns, no sharp gestures; the focus is on texture, resonance, and patience.
Sylph works more like an environment: music for meditation, late-night listening, or the kind of quiet cinematic scenes where sound has to expand space without filling it.
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