why we love this

A soothing massage for the ears and mind. Nico Georis’ movements reflect the album and track titles themselves. From start to finish, it twinkles and glides as softly and non-conspicuously as a cloud across a wide-open sky.

about the record

Conceived after an isolating, five-year struggle with a severe case of Lyme disease, Cloud Suites documents Nico Georis’s initial return to experimental ambient keyboard compositions. Conceptually, there is little ambiguity here: the songs—the “suites”—are clouds, or, rather, reflections of clouds, each named after a particular formation. Track titles range from the meteorologically specific to the expressive: “Cumuloids,” “Sundog,” and “Soft Yellow Gazers.” Georis composed the suites in real-time, peering out the windows of his Big Sur cabin-home/recording studio (dubbed The Sky Shed), responding improvisationally to render specific clouds as music—in effect to pluck them from the sky. Georis has referred to this process as a kind of musical game, and, indeed, its end product conveys the recurring and joyful revelations of play.

But for a project born of levity and improvisation, Cloud Suites’ path to realization has been winding—harrowing, even. Over three years in the making, the recording process was beset by all manner of technological and environmental setbacks, ranging from broken equipment to a mudslide that tore through the Sky Shed. When circumstances finally aligned, Georis entered the studio with a rag-tag collection of tape recordings. Performing over these demos, Georis would eventually weave these initial recordings into finished tracks, an analogue collage/cut-up approach recalling his childhood basement experiments, and his long-time affinity for dub.