Xhin leans into undulating ambient soundscapes on his forthcoming album

Singaporean DJ and producer Xhin has announced his forthcoming album called ‘The Images Within’. The album is due out on April 18, 2022 on The Document, Xhin’s own independent record label based in Singapore.

The eight-track album will be released both digitally and on vinyl, with the vinyl edition limited to 200 copies.

Having been active in music for two decades and always known as a left-field electronic artist — and also as one of earliest artists from Asia to play at Berghain during a Stroboscopic Artefacts Showcase in 2013 — those who know him might feel that album, which leans into undulating ambient soundscapes, is a step away from his usual techno-driven grooves. But the multi-instrumentalist has long been infusing his music and mixes with compositional flourishes, ambient touches and live instrumentation.

The forthcoming album is described as being less a return to Xhin’s roots than “a solo fulfilment of long-held, diverse desires; his true colours, offering an entry into his holistically experimental, analogue, and very human world.”

“Incited by mortality’s harsh confrontation of us, his first album on his own label — The Document — may shock or alienate, but its intensely visual poetry of the medieval and antiquarian, its song cycles between and within genres, its independent core of melancholy and necessary catharsis: they are all, as ever, open to anyone who cares to step in.”

The album’s eight tracks have been likened to a soundtrack in search of a film, perhaps something by Villeneuve, Lynch, Ōshima or Toshio Matsumoto.

Tracklist:

1. ‘This Is Not The Beginning’
2. ‘Hyperion’
3. ‘The Images Within'
4. ‘Illumina’
5. ‘Unravel’
6. ‘Sea Of Deceit’
7. ‘No Consolation’
8. ‘Perennial’

Listen to the title track below:

‘The Images Within’ by Xhin is available now for pre-order on Bandcamp.