Bay Area composer Dren McDonald's latest project, Vox Pterous, came out at the end of July.

The project has a deep backstory: back in 2023, Dren built Pterous — a collection of instrumental pieces as a way to process mourning. Each cut was his way of honoring someone who'd passed away in his life. He'd take a simple melodic phrase and overdub it endlessly on different instruments, creating these dense, textured arrangements, akin to the works of Steve Reich and Terry Riley.

Now he's returning to those same compositions and layering human singing on top. An artist named Sophia James (25 million plays on Spotify) became the test case, and her performance convinced Dren to open this up to other singers. He rounded up contributors from wildly different musical territories — people who'd worked on Death Stranding 2, experimental ensembles, underground performers. Each brings their own texture.

The end result honors the original pain but somehow feels generous, warm, and full of life.

The opening track of Vox Pterous is "Anchors Up," a collaboration with vocalist Amelie Anna that sets the album's entire emotional trajectory.

From the very first moments, McDonald's distinctive spatial sensibility announces itself through distant, ethereal vocals — as if we are not hearing Amelie Anna sing, but rather remembering her voice. There's something Platonic in this gesture: the soul recalling ideas from the realm of Forms, pulled from some distant memory we didn't know we possessed.

Then enters the acoustic guitar, recorded with that careful, unconventional placement. As McDonald notes in describing his recording approach: "It's never just a 57 shoved in front of guitar cabinet. I recorded the acoustic guitars in the live room from 3 different distances on each part, and even setup my dining room with a similar setup for some of the acoustic guitar parts." You sense immediately that something is about to unfold, that the ground might shift beneath you at any moment.

The repeating phrases build and spiral. The lyrics themselves invoke cycles ("Drawing little circles, drawing little circles rise and fall"), and the music mirrors this perfectly. It's a Hegelian development — Aufhebung — a dialectical unfolding that moves upward in spirals. For the first couple minutes, there is genuine vertigo. The accumulation is relentless, hypnotic — dizzying in its forward momentum.

And then — a shift. The music begins to contract, to fold back in on itself, with the same gradual, imperceptible grace with which it had expanded. A patina settles over the brightness. The gloss fades without your quite noticing when it happened.

It recalls the life cycle of a flower: the opening, the reaching toward light, the gathering of strength, the bright fullness of bloom. And then the withering — slow, inevitable. The bowing of the head, the drift toward sleep. In such a flower's life, night far outweighs day. Perhaps it grows somewhere northern, where the light itself is rationed, where seasons are measured in darkness. This is the journey McDonald traces: ascent and decline, bloom and fade, all held within a single, spiraling arc.

The second movement brings us to "Resting of Light," where McDonald pairs two vocalists whose approaches could not be more distinct — Carla Kihlstedt, the grounded experimentalist whose work with Sleepytime Gorilla Museum and Tom Waits has made her a singular voice in contemporary music, and Amelie Anna, now returning as the ethereal counterpoint.

The textures here pulse like falling rain — but it is rain that seems to exist in two worlds simultaneously. Kihlstedt's voice is earthy, present, immediate. You hear each breath, each slight intake of air, as if she stands mere inches from you in the darkness. Her physicality is undeniable, tactile. Meanwhile, Amelie Anna hovers above, weightless, suspended in some other dimension entirely.

This is Hegel made audible: the unity and struggle of opposites from which all movement and development springs. Parrying, floating textures — airy, insubstantial — against a deep bass that anchors everything, that refuses to let the piece dissolve into pure abstraction. Up and down. Breath and suspension. Earth and sky, locked in dialectical embrace.

The rain falls, plays across the surface of something bright, and then passes — as if it never was. The piece dissolves almost without trace. Yet in that dissolution lies a kind of completion. We have not arrived anywhere in particular, reached no final destination. Instead, we find ourselves moved, shifted, prepared for what comes next — a transition into the work that follows, as if the damp earth itself were leading us forward.

The third piece, "Aviator Eyes," returns to those same waltz-like textures that seem to dance on tiptoe — raindrop rhythms once again. Yet the mood has shifted perceptibly. From the opening moment, there is a heaviness that was not present before, a weight that settles into the music like moisture into cloth.

And when the bass line activates, grows more insistent, the piece gains even greater density. We are no longer suspended in air; we are being pulled downward, into something.

The lyrics speak of a secret garden. But this is not mere secrecy born of silence or omission. This garden exists in another dimension entirely — behind a mirror, down a rabbit hole, obscured by some transparent membrane through which ordinary sight cannot penetrate. It is the garden of dreams, of the subconscious, of parallel realities folded into the cracks of our own.

And only the aviator — that figure whose eyes see from impossible heights, whose vantage point transcends the earthbound perspective — can glimpse what lies there. The aviator becomes a threshold figure, a traveler between worlds. To see with an aviator's eyes is to perceive another reality altogether, hidden in plain sight, accessible only to those who know how to look from the proper altitude.

But then, almost without warning, at around 6 minutes, the descent begins. The music retracts, the threads unwind, and we find ourselves returned to where we started — the ordinary world reasserting itself, the garden sealed once more behind its invisible barrier. The vision passes. We are grounded again.

We have circled long enough in the air. Now comes the descent — underground, into the dark.

The reverb that gave the music its buoyancy, that filled the silences between sounds, has vanished on "The Things He Could Bury". In its absence, the empty spaces gape. They yawn open, exposed and vulnerable. The bass grows heavier still — not the anchoring bass of "Anchors Up," but something that presses down with geologic weight, as if we have tunneled deep beneath the earth's surface.
And above us — though we cannot see it — the measured, thunderous footfall of an elephant. We hear it not merely with our ears, but with our entire bodies. Its percussion becomes a felt thing, a physical presence that moves through bone and blood.

Down here, in this subterranean chamber, the sadness persists. Surrounding us are mycelial networks, tree roots branching in all directions, their filaments spreading like a map of loss. The vocalists mirror this architecture. Their voices intertwine and diverge, branch and rejoin, calling to one another like the spirits of those who have passed below, like souls recognizing each other in the dark, communicating across the distance that death creates.
This is grief made tangible. Not the soaring, ethereal grief of remembrance from above, but the rooted, earthbound, corporeal grief of those left behind — the living pressing their hands against the soil, feeling for the presence of what has been lost.

"She's The Sky" comes with the weight of Heaven. The title promises lightness — sky, air, the vault above us. Yet the music that unfolds is heavier still, denser than what came before. Not heavier in the manner of "The Things He Could Bury," with its elephant's tread and geologic pressure, but heavier in texture, in density, in the sheer compaction of sound.

The gaping voids that punctuated the previous piece have sealed themselves. There are no longer those yawning silences, those spaces between sounds where the ear could rest. Instead, the music presses in from all sides, thick as fog, as if we have descended even further — not into chambers of earth, but into some substance denser than air, denser even than water.

And the bass — it no longer roars with constant weight. Instead, it speaks in measured utterances. It tolls. With regular intervals, each bass passage strikes like the clang of a funeral bell, marking time, marking loss, marking the slow progression toward something inevitable. Each strike reverberates through the density, through the thickness, a solemn knell that refuses to let us forget where we are.

This is the paradox of the song's title made manifest: the sky, which should be weightless, becomes the heaviest thing of all. The vault above becomes a lid that will not lift.

But redemption must come. There must be something beyond the dome, something singing from the other side of the veil, some divine golden energy seeping through.
And it arrives in the final track, "Fading," featuring Sophia James. That golden note — dusty, earthen, grounded in the material world — arrives on her voice. But something extraordinary happens: periodically, reverb unfolds around her voice, lifting it upward, transmuting the earthly into the heavenly. The terrestrial becomes transcendent.

And there is a sound — neither quite synthesizer nor theremin nor guitar played with an electric bow — something we could not pin down. It wails, it sings, it becomes itself a voice, an answer from the other side of whatever membrane separates us from what lies beyond.

As the piece progresses, everything begins to dissolve. The density gives way. The weight releases. Reality itself becomes permeable, surrenders to that golden light. The music becomes rays — dust motes spinning in those rays as they pierce the dome of a cathedral. It becomes the half-conscious dissolution that comes just before sleep, that moment when the solid world loses its grip and begins to shimmer into abstraction.

It becomes, finally, like the souls in Bosch's "Ascent to Empyrean" — caught not in hellish torment but in some ineffable suspension, lifted upward by an aerodynamic current, no longer bound by gravity or flesh, spiraling into light.

The album completes its arc. We have ascended and descended, been anchored and set adrift, buried and resurrected. And in the end, we dissolve into gold.

What I particularly value in art is not merely a fresh or interesting perspective — it's a vision that penetrates beyond the threshold. Not only beyond the ordinary, finding something new in what we see and feel every day, but beyond the very boundary of existence itself. And yes, I'll say it — bold enough to venture past the boundary between life and death. Into territories we cannot even imagine. The kind of audacity that Bosch, for instance, had the courage to attempt.

Vox Pterous attempts exactly this — at least, that's what I heard and felt in listening to it. This is not just an experience of avant-garde classical music or art pop. Not even simply a musical experience. It's something separate, something that aims beyond the reach of those categories altogether. For achieving that, Dren McDonald has done what few artists manage: he has made something that transcends what language can measure or notes can contain.