Pablo’s Eye, the ever-changing collective led by Brussels-based producer Axel Libeert, makes a welcome and fascinating return to STROOM.tv. Everything You Give Away is a record where sound, poetry, and memory seem to occupy the same space, producing something cinematic without ever becoming overly dramatic.
The album’s ten tracks move through a remarkably spacious world. ‘Walking the Line’ establishes the record’s unhurried character, while ‘Bardo for Pablo’ and ‘Rêverie’ deepen its dreamlike quality. The sequencing shows deliberate patience: rather than rushing toward conventional peaks and resolutions, the album lets individual sounds and ideas linger.
What makes the record particularly interesting is the relationship between its music and Richard Skinner‘s writing. The record is built around Skinner’s narrative poem “a remoteness from the centre” (originally published in his 2013 collection The Light User Scheme). Pablo’s Eye distills the imagery of his poems into something beautifully elusive, from waves and green pebbles to a missing jade earring and the strange emotional relief that comes with letting something disappear. Those images give the electronic and ambient textures an emotional vocabulary without forcing the music into a literal narrative.
The album also holds a fascinating tension between disappearance and preservation. ‘Losing Love’ is barely two minutes long, while ‘October ’74‘ expands into the album’s longest piece. That contrast reinforces the sense that memory does not preserve everything equally; some moments arrive as fleeting impressions, while others remain strangely vivid (‘View Point”) long after the first experience has passed.
One Bandcamp listener described it as “the kind of album that leaves you space to think and snaps you back to reality at all the right moments.” Nowhere is that more apparent than on ‘The Wind at Night‘, a track that captures that balance beautifully.
Pablo’s Eye describe themselves as a temporary atmosphere, “like a taste or a dream,” and that is an unusually accurate way of approaching Everything You Give Away. The album does not explain itself completely. Instead, it leaves impressions behind fragments of places, conversations, weather and memories that become increasingly difficult to separate from one another.
Rather than treating ambient music as background, Pablo’s Eye uses atmosphere as the central subject. Everything You Give Away is ultimately about what remains when something has already begun to disappear: a sound, an image, a line of poetry, or simply a feeling that refuses to leave.
