There are albums you listen to, and then there are albums you enter. Blinded by Bastien Pons belongs entirely to the latter. This isn’t music in the traditional sense—it’s architecture. A living, breathing space composed of fractured field recordings, distant drones, and shadowed textures that seem to move around you rather than at you. It’s immersive, yes, but more than that, it’s disorienting most beautifully—like feeling your way through a memory that isn’t entirely your own.
Coming out of France with a background in black-and-white photography and tutelage under musique concrète pioneer Bernard Fort, Pons approaches sound like a visual artist. Every frequency in Blinded is a shade of grey, every sonic collision a flashbulb in a darkroom. The result is a sonic language that feels both deeply tactile and eerily intangible. You don’t just hear these tracks—you sense them, in your skin, in the space around you. The influence of The Residents and Meredith Monk can be felt in the composition’s strangeness, while the likes of Lustmord and Coil haunt its atmosphere.
There’s very little in the way of melody as we’re used to—what emerges instead are skeletal motifs and fragile pulses, peeking through layers of industrial hiss and ambient decay. At times, it feels like the walls themselves are breathing, like the entire album was recorded in an abandoned building where the past still lingers. Blinded invites you into silence, only to reveal how alive silence can be. Each crackle, each hum, each fragment of concrete sound becomes part of a slow, deliberate unveiling. It’s not dramatic—it’s ritualistic.
And while Blinded is experimental, it’s never cold. There’s a real emotional fragility running underneath the machinery and fog. Pons’ work is soaked in restraint, avoiding the bombast of cinematic ambient or the aggression of noise music. Instead, he leans into tension and quiet detail—echoes that fade before they can be fully grasped, sounds that slip through the fingers like fine dust. There’s something human buried deep inside this sonic stone—something wounded, watching, remembering.
Ultimately, Blinded isn’t a record you press play on and walk away from—it asks you to stop, to feel, to step inside its delicate storm. Bastien Pons hasn’t created an album so much as a sensory mirror, one that reflects whatever darkness or softness the listener brings to it. It’s as much an emotional excavation as it is a musical one. For those willing to sit in its stillness and let it speak slowly, Blinded is unforgettable—a quiet masterpiece whispered through shadows.
