silent collision found inspiration where most musicians never even think to look — in the sound of a fan in the middle of the night. And I mean that literally: an ordinary household appliance, squeaking slightly at a certain rotation speed, became the starting point for an EP that reimagines everything he had done before. Air Vent Lullabies is six tracks built around the nocturnal life of the mind, with the fan running as a through-line from the very first second to the last.

The conversation about the nature of inspiration in music has long since calcified into a genre with its own clichés: the artist suffers, the artist falls in love, the artist flies to Iceland and stares at fjords. silent collision breaks out of that narrative with methodical calm. His EP argues that any sound can become a source — if you stop and truly listen to it. A fan exists in everyone’s life — in a hostel, in a hotel room, in your own bedroom in summer — and yet it never becomes an object of attention. It’s background. It’s infrastructure. silent collision made it the protagonist, and there is more artistic courage in that decision than in most concept albums that claim to be original.

Five of the six tracks on the EP came from silent collision‘s previous catalog — reworked, reconsidered, stripped of vocals, solos, and everything else typically regarded as the essential attributes of music. The sixth, Darkness Within Darkness, is the only new piece, written specifically for this release. What silent collision has done with the existing material is difficult to call a remix or a reissue: it’s closer to looking at the same events from a different angle, from a different hour of the night.

Genre classification here is a trap. Any label you try to stick onto Air Vent Lullabies will be accurate by about a third and misleading for the other two. silent collision operates in a space where no convenient labels have yet been invented — and judging by the EP, they’re perfectly fine with that.

Look At The Sky opens the EP without warning and without a warm-up. The fan — slightly squeaking, slightly uneven — immediately establishes the space: a dark room, possibly night, possibly somewhere between night and dawn. The sound settles into stillness, and it’s precisely within that stillness that things begin to happen. The brain, deprived of a clear melodic line, starts constructing its own image. For some it will be a hotel, white pressed linen, an open window. For someone else — something else entirely. This is a deliberate strategy, and it is fully justified.

Exhale, Inhale introduces a new texture: drops of water, sounds that could be an SMS notification or a drip from the ceiling — the distinction doesn’t matter. The track acquires movement where the previous one stood still. Something begins to shift — not quickly, not dramatically, but it shifts.

With The Stars is a track about falling asleep, and it reproduces that state so precisely that the boundary between listening and the process itself starts to blur. There is more air here, more of a sense of height.

Empty Hallway, 4:14am — the time stated in the title does half the track’s work before a note has played. Four fourteen in the morning is the hour when the brain operates by its own rules, and silent collision knows this. The track is the most densely populated with the feeling of something invisible being present. The fan sounds more unsettling here, rattles differently, and that is a conscious choice.

Air Vent Lullaby is the EP’s central track in spirit, even if fifth in sequence. Everything returns here to the starting point — to the star visible through the window, to the feeling of a dawn that is coming soon. This track is dark ambient in its purest form; there is a faint trace of rhythm in it, but it’s buried so deep it seems like nothing more than a ticking sound, which, as you continue listening, dissolves further into something resembling a faint crackle.

Darkness Within Darkness closes the EP and distinguishes itself from the other tracks instrumentally — guitar arpeggios appear here, suspended in their own reflection. The only new piece in the EP, and it holds its own. The guitar expands the concept, adding something more tangible to the hum of the fan, something almost warm.

Air Vent Lullabies is a release that is easy to underestimate on a casual listen. Someone who puts on the first track through headphones on the subway will most likely feel nothing in particular — and in a formal sense, they won’t be wrong. The EP demands specific conditions: darkness, a horizontal position, headphones, a willingness to release control over where your thoughts go. Through speakers, the sound will dissolve into the ambient noise around it and become exactly what it pretends to be — mere background hum. This is a deliberate bet by the artist on a listener who is prepared to create the right conditions for the music, and there is a certain honesty in that bet. silent collision does not attempt to adapt to any context — they offer their own. Holding that against them is like criticizing a film for looking bad on a phone with the sound off. The demand placed on listening conditions is not a limitation of the concept — it is its integrity.

The fact that five of the six tracks existed previously raises the obvious question of just how radically the EP reimagines its source material. That question cannot be answered from within the EP alone, without the originals. But the EP is self-sufficient — it functions as a complete statement, and in the end, that is the only thing that matters.

*This review was made possible by SubmitHub