Amber is a sunlit shard of time, where the breath of eternity stands still. Its golden flesh, a drop of frozen light, holds tiny tragedies: winged travelers who never reached the sky. Buds, leaves, stems, and vines drawn into the resin in their pursuit of live become relics within amber icons. Their memoris like threads of the past, still reach toward life. But all is silent. Like music, amber is a way to stop time. It preserves motion in a moment, making the fleeting eternal. In this sense, the sound of the album “Tendrils” by Old Man of the Woods can be compared to a flower buds in amber – frozen between past and present.
But who hides behind this mystical name – perhaps a myth that has taken the shape of amber? Old Man of the Woods is the musical counterpart of Miranda Elliott, an artist from Seattle. Her ethereal vocals resemble the rustle of leaves, blending with the electric pulses of emotion. She sings of what is forgotten and still in motion. Elliott turns emotional chaos into songs that evoke the sound of the sea, salty spray, the forest scent of moss and damp grass. With her debut album “Votives” and the mini-releases “Dissolve” and “Devolve“, Elliott wandered like a forest spirit from the damp northwestern coast of the U.S. to the shores of Europe.
Now she returns with “Tendrils”, her second full-length album, released on June 13 by the New York-based label Totally Real Records. The album was born in the silence of an old sanatorium by a lakeside in Biesenthal, Germany – a place where the air itself sounds like a memory. The album consists of seven textured, unsettling tracks, shimmering with light and shadow.
Tendrils is like an ancient drop of amber, in which longing has frozen. The record opens with the symbolic “Amber”, where Elliott works within the aesthetic of slow burning: the sounds – like a warm drop of resin – slide down the trunk until the moment of crystallization. In terms of genre, “Amber” is electro-pop stripped of its gloss and rhythmic obsession. Replacing brightness with transparency, Elliott minimizes structure, leaving only an emotional trace – a whisper of synths, muted percussion, rare flashes of harmony. She departs from narrative and constructs the song as a landscape.
This approach is clearly revealed in the track “Anticipating” – electro-pop built at the edge between expectation and breakdown.Here, sound is a stretched thread. Synths tremble, and the singer’s voice sounds restrained, hidden. It’s music you can enter like an abandoned winter garden, where something still lives, waiting to be touched. Against the backdrop of the first two tracks, the contrasting “Anonymity” stands out sharply – a kind of distilled electro-pop, brought to the limit of abstraction.Sound stripped of individuality, dissolved in digital texture. The vocals are slightly detached, as if conveying the echo of a collective consciousness – voices merging into a single neutral stream.
The electronic elements create a sterile environment, devoid of gesture. In contrast, the track “Jellyfish” is an example of how electro-pop turns sound into a tangible substance. It is built on viscous synth layers, flowing like liquid neon, with a pulsing rhythm reminiscent of breathing. The vocals barely touch the surface, weaving into the texture and creating an atmosphere of fluidity and weightlessness. Music on the edge of dream and anxiety, soft at first glance, but with an intense inner drama. In “Jellyfish”, the characteristic aesthetic of electro-pop is present – emotional ambiguity and a balance between comfort and danger, light and synthetic depth.
“Abide” is a glowing crystal of the genre, where humility and strength merge in a single breath. The track unfolds slowly, like an inhale, and the voice is patient and wise, like the whisper of leaves from an ancient tree. The music pulses from within, evoking the fragile strength that holds the world together. Within these vibrations, the album’s “musical riddle” is born – the track “Mystery”. It never fully reveals its essence, like amber in which the wind has frozen. Wrapped in “Mystery”, the music sounds like breath between the lines – ghostly, elusive. Here, music becomes the shadow of meaning itself, calling toward the fragile emptiness of secrets and hints – where feeling matters more than resolution. As the final track, “Meditation” is chosen radically different from conventional endings. Its music turns into crystalline silence, laying bare a space pure as the interior of a mineral, where an elusive glimmer suddenly appears calm, transparent. The synths breathe time: gently, evenly. And within this sound perfect restraint, peace, and silent presence.
The album “Tendrils” by Old Man of the Woods is a release layered layers of sounds and voices filled with light and shadow, anxiety and calm. Miranda Elliott captures fleeting moments, turning them into eternity, where sound becomes space, and emotions – the pulse of life hidden within a transparent shell. This album is a slow dissolution into the atmosphere of electro-pop, melodies flare up like individual crystals, holding mystery and fragile emotion, opening a space for experience that goes beyond music.
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