Released 14 April 2023

Eight Reflections in Darkness, Martyn Heyne’s latest solo electric guitar record, presents a series of introspective, personal vignettes. When the Berlin-based artist first recorded the album, he ventured to a church, capturing the reverberation of his guitar. But he realized that wasn’t what the music needed—these compositions were about simplicity and honesty. So, he went to his studio and re-recorded it with just his guitar and a couple of amps, leaving in the breaths, foot taps, and finger-picked sounds that come with a live performance. In this form, Heyne taps into the music’s intimacy, encouraging us to look inward as we listen.

Heyne’s guitar playing has appeared everywhere from being in the indie rock band Efterklang to solo performances on tours with Balmorhea and A Winged Victory for the Sullen. A classically trained player, his music often takes a genre-fluid format, collaging a variety of classical and popular idioms. Much of his prior work employed a variety of instruments to make full, upbeat melodies—albums like 2020’s Open Lines brought in cello, piano, and a slew of percussion instruments. But the sound he chooses on Eight Reflections in Darkness takes his work into a new, softer direction that emphasizes his stripped-down voice and captures a fleeting moment in time.

The inspiration for this sound came as Heyne watched a series of videos of Picasso drawing on a glass pane. In one of the videos, he drew a bull in white paint—it’s just an outline of the animal, yet to Heyne, it captured the essence of a bull as much as, or more than, a photograph. He then set out to make music that felt like a line drawing, sketching out the contours of the sound, but not coloring in every piece. The resulting album is a mix of lucid compositions derived from improvisations. Heyne workshopped his melodies, and when he hit on one he liked, he wrote it down, but he didn’t revisit those scores until he recorded the music, coming to every piece with a sense of freshness that drives the album’s emotional ebb and flow.

Each piece feels like a window into a different feeling. Opener “Snow on the Leaves” immediately asks us to look inward with a few tender strums that hover in quietude and connect by delicate plucks and fragmented melodies. Much of the album exists in this poignant space, but occasionally, Heyne branches out: “Ludwig’s Wonder” takes on a buoyant, airy feeling through staccato plucks and lilting melodies, maintaining a sense of quietude but taking on a fuller, brighter spectrum of sound. In contrast, the dark “Fire in my Eyes” emphasizes low, repeating rhythms, letting Heyne’s layers unfold with a little more uncertainty. But regardless of where each track ends up, Heyne always focuses on gentle contemplation, making music that inspires reflection.

And while Heyne’s melodies are often unadorned, laid bare except for a hint of an echo, he plays each note with fervor, unearthing the emotions lying between every pitch. Like Picasso’s line drawing of a bull, Heyne’s music finds depth within every statement, showing that simplicity doesn’t lack feeling. In fact, it may go even deeper.

Vanessa Ague, New York, December 2022