It is often the deepest part of the night when absence becomes the most apparent, a very specific kind of heartache and soul deep longing seemingly reserved for the blurry hours between 4 and 5 AM when it feels like you are the only person still awake and the only light left to see by is the faint glow of your phone and the old text messages you can’t stop pouring over, the mind retreading old ground and searching for new constellations but finding only dying stars.

On the self titled debut for Quiet Control, Blue Gender explores the borderlands of wakefulness and dream where we lie most vulnerable, the unguarded territories of the heart where the rawest truth of ourselves is most impossible to deny; a simple need to be held, to lean into the weightless release of losing oneself in the arms of another.

Like a silken veil descended on the listener, Blue Gender’s quiet power bleeds from the speakers in pulses of soft diffuse light. Synth pads flicker like candles and curl in on themselves in twisting tendrils as if reaching towards the sky in quiet invocation, each desperate cry from the sampler etching its way through the mind like fingers tracing lines through static. A sound so undiluted in its sadness and regret that it feels almost sacred to behold, a gentle and gratifying reminder that even in the moments when we feel most alone, the quietest hours of the night will always be there to hold us.

Artwork by Micah Giraudau.

Words by ghosttropics.