Press reviews
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- A Closer Listen:
"[...] a timely meditation on the fragility of our place in the natural world and a beautiful aural accompaniment to the slow decline towards the darkest time of the year."

- Echoes And Dust:
"One is full of languid, almost melancholic sounds, [...] Yet Swerts creates his music without overt pathos, it is all subdued, or even more so, sublime."

- Gezeitenstrom Musicmagazine:
"[...] Adriaan Swerts shows once again that even the worst events in life do not prevent the creation of practically timeless music. [...] melancholy on a very high standard, effortlessly reaching the deepest bottom of the listener's soul with its [...] very atmospheric, very sensitive sound cathedrals [...]."

- Music Won't Save You:
"the twelve pieces on his debut album [...] distill the essence of a sweet balm for the soul"

- Luminous Dash:
"[...] painfully honest neo-classical ambient. [...] A piece of musical poetry and a search for those sparkles of beauty that make everything worthwhile."

- Music Dances When You Sleep:
"[...] lifting the listener a few inches above the ground and for good."

- Last Day Deaf:
"[...] a spine-chilling, audiovisual experience, [...]"

- Nagamag:
“[...] full of remembrance, when you are lost in your thoughts [...] within the music that is the opposite, so gentle and beautiful. ”

- The Slow Music Movement:
“[...] the forthcoming LP from Adriaan Swerts is already sounding like another winner [...]"

About the album
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Belgian composer and sound artist Adriaan Swerts announces the release of his debut full-length album One in collaboration with piano and coffee records – a collection of twelve deeply personal compositions that, originally, were not conceived with the idea of ever getting released but that, like shards of ice, slowly floated together and formed an island of music.

Both a life-threatening accident – which caused his disability – and the passing of his grandfather confronted Adriaan with the fragility of life. Thematically, this album deals with the eternal, life fading away, death, and the afterlife. At the same time, it attempts to celebrate the beauty of love, life, nature and all that lives on earth.

The characteristic sounds on this album are field recordings of natural landscapes Adriaan visited, which he transformed into instruments and used almost solely to compose. The piano and other acoustic instruments such as the harmonium and strings, as old but not forgotten classical friends, are the other elements that accompany these transformed natural sounds. Icelandic glaciers, geysers, Scottish lochs, waterfalls, oceans and more all found a home on this album. In addition, Swerts uses reel-to-reel tape processing to degrade the sound of the recordings and make them sound broken – a reflection of what his body feels like.

The artwork of the album similarly reflects Adriaan's focus on the theme of the fragility of life and nature. The cracks in the ice symbolise how easily something can be broken into pieces – just like what happened to his body after his accident – but can still be a whole. In addition, Adriaan crafted a videoclip for each piece of the album through the process of cymatics – the study of visible sound vibration and the transformational nature of sound and matter. He filmed the sound vibrations caused by his music in water, unveiling beautiful and unique geometric patterns for each composition.