i've been sick a lot lately... coughing blabla etc. after a long time of staying indoors, i decided to go for a walk in the forest. to my surprise, porcelain dolls with various musical instruments appeared before my eyes. they wanted to make my walk more enjoyable, following me and playing beautiful melodies as i admired the scenery. thank you, fragile beings :)

porcelain doll festival

cluster beam_20251016

Living Room n°90 ~ @ghosttropics

~

q. pls introduce yourself:

a. Hi! I’m Ryan aka ghosttropics and I think most people on here know me as “that person who is in the comment boxes of all the ambient releases on bandcamp”. Mostly I’m just a huge music nerd/listener/dancer, but I try to write about the music that care about as much as I can as a way to engage with the community a bit more and to give back to the artists who bless me with the music that brings so much to my life. Which is how you guys found me! This is only the second mix I ever made and I’ve since worked on a couple more, and it’s becoming this very fulfilling new thing in my life that I look forward to exploring a bit more.

q. is there a story behind the mix?

a. First of all I just wanted to thank you guys for having me here and giving me this opporunity to work on this mix, which ended up being very meaningful and downright therapeutic for me to make. It is dedicated to my late best friend Blakely, and also to anyone who lives with that soul deep and unnameable feeling of missing someone, but also feeling them with you all the time. At the very centre of the mix (both figuratively and at the literal halfway point) is a track of Blakes that I hadn’t been able to bring myself to listen to for years. I always thought it was one of the most beautiful things I ever heard and just the purest audio distillation of everything I loved about my friend, and as soon as the mix started to come together I knew it was the right time to bring it back into my life. Everything from there just seemed to come together on is own as if guided by a gentle hand.

The feeling I tried to capture in this mix is not simply sadness because grief is SO much more than that. It’s about how that sadness can also be so deeply intertwined with a feeling of indescribable gratitude and joy in having known a person, and it’s about all the beautiful and unexpected ways we can keep them with us throughout our lives. To me, this mix is exactly that. A way to share the story of my friend with the world and feel closer to him, and I hope that listening to this can give others the space to remember and relate to their own experiences in a way that feels meaningful as well.

q. what’s the best way to enjoy your mix?

a. As is my answer to most things: lying down, eyes closed, cuddling a cute dog. But really, wherever works best for you! 

q. describe a favourite object in your living room...

a. I found the most beautiful/perfect antique rocking chair with a rocking footrest on the sidewalk a couple months ago and I swear I could not even conceptualize a better reading chair. I refused to buy one for years because I wanted it to be perfect (I read nearly as much as I listen to music) and part of me feels like I willed this thing into reality. 

q. are you working on any projects right now (music or not music)?

a. I’m thinking about maybe starting some sort of newsletter as my friends keep telling me to do, but for now I’m just gonna keep writing my little bandcamp reviews and making more mixes, cause that’s what’s feeling good right now. And despite my past promise to myself to never become a DJ (half joking) maybe buy a controller and start figuring out how to do some of this stuff live at some point!

Living Room n°90 ~ ghosttropics

vånda - vanvett

Out now on lagerstaette.bandcamp.com! 

Mastered by James Bernard at Ambient Mountain House.

Cover art by Heléne Wennerberg.

Crawl

Paul

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