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Somewhere between Copenhagen and Melbourne – where time zones slip past each other like ghosts – two musicians reached across the distance, not to meet in the middle, but to let their sounds dissolve into each other, like mist curling into water. “Now We Are Branches And Leaves”, the hour-long collaboration between øjeRum (Paw Grabowski) and Peter Knight, is less a piece of music and more a slow exhalation, a landscape formed from patience and erosion.

There is something inherently dreamlike in its structure: a looping piano motif, neither insisting nor fading, simply existing in a kind of weightless suspension. Knight’s trumpet drifts in like an apparition, never quite settling, always slightly out of reach, while electronic wisps weave through the spaces in between, as if the whole piece were composed from echoes of things left unsaid. It’s a collage not just in method – two musicians layering their distant realities – but in sensation, where individual elements blur together until the edges are no longer distinct.

It’s tempting to call this music ambient, but “Now We Are Branches And Leaves” resists being mere background. It is too tactile, too emotionally resonant, like a memory you can’t quite place but still feel lingering in your chest. The warmth of the piano, the breath of the trumpet, the distant hum of the electronics… it all feels as if it has already begun to fade, like autumn leaves still attached to the branch but knowing their time is short.

øjeRum is no stranger to the art of distillation. His works – whether visual collages or delicate soundscapes – tend to pare things down to their essence, revealing beauty in quiet repetition. Peter Knight, a celebrated experimental trumpeter and composer, brings a similar sense of restraint, knowing that what is left unplayed is just as important as what is heard. Together, they’ve created something that feels neither bound by place nor time, existing instead in the liminal space between longing and stillness.

A single piece, stretching across an hour, like watching the light shift through the branches of a tree. It moves without moving, changes without changing, and by the end, you may not be sure if you’ve drifted off into another world – or if it was this world, all along, that had shifted around you.