Damian Valles

A little more than ten years after Extrusions, Damian Valles returns to BLWBCK with Sundowning. An album to get lost and a ritualistic meditation on loss itself, where every familiar contour slowly fades and dissolves into shadow. Based in Ontario, Valles has long explored the porous boundaries between ambient minimalism, drone and post-rock. His music often feels suspended between states, both physical and ephemeral, sacred and decaying. On Sundowning, this tension deepens into something raw and hallucinatory. Each sound seems to wither as it appears, leaving behind only an afterimage, a trembling trace in the air. We find again the unmistakable climate of his earlier works: long tones covered in dust, fragments of the real world such as footsteps, wind, metal and wood, woven into vast and ghostly architectures. The album unfolds like a plunge into darkness, a rite of passage without destination, where every chapter disorients a little more. The horizon slips away, and what once seemed like guidance turns into a mirage. Sundowning is a demanding and merciless work. It drifts toward an opaque and burning unknown, a place where the sun no longer rises. We wander through a forest on fire, surrounded by scattered memories slowly turning to ash, until even their shape disappears into the smoke. What remains is not redemption, but the quiet dissolution of everything once known, sinking back into the penumbra.