ANDREW SCHOEN, Soulever

Having covered ambient new age music for several decades, I’ve found it easy to get complacent and just assume that artists who weave their sonic magic in the genre are more interested in helping us chill/de-stress with spacey walls and soothing washes than fully engage and provoke our hearts, minds and souls with fascinating arrays of intricate sounds.

While Andrew Schoen’s first Wayfarer Music Group album, the heavily immersive five suite recording OTHERness, beautifully fit this description, I’m thankful that the innovative, wildly adventurous composer and multi-instrumentalist takes a fresh approach with his follow-up, the uniquely titled Soulever. More reflective of the sonic inventiveness of his 2014 independent genre debut Surroundings, the 10-track, nearly hour-long opus shakes these common perceptions of ambient music with a product that’s richly textured, sometimes folky, sometimes jazzy, quite often exotic and infused with dynamic soundscape expressions that defy easy stylistic categorization.

Schoen brings a multi-faceted musical background to his emergence as an instrumental artist. With both parents being classical musicians, piano lessons were mandatory when he was growing up in Carmel, CA, and he took an early shine to Bach and Japanese composer Tomita. But ultimately it was electronic music and prog rock that won his musical heart, and he began recording his own music in his late teens. While studying Visual Communications at Southern IL University, he started an organization called The Independent Music Network (IMN), whose goal was supporting indie artists.

Schoen and his team printed catalogs and magazines, had a syndicated radio show and produced numerous CD samplers sponsored by Musician magazine. He spent years away from music while raising his family, but during this pre-internet era, he made many connections with musicians in the new age genre. Decades later, one of these, guitarist Carl Weingarten, is among the handful of veteran artists who make a guest appearance on Soulever, complementing the vast array of sounds Schoen creates via Ableton Live, VST synthesizers, acoustic instruments. He says his tools are “much like an EDM artist would, but of course my lane is more chill.

Nothing quite compares to the otherworldly aural wonder of listening to Soulever from start to finish as these kinds of free-flowing albums are designed for. In my case, I let it run several times on repeat for an even fuller immersion and a kaleidoscope of electronic colors. Yet the track Weingarten electrifies with his crackling slide guitar, “Reciprocity,” is as perfect an entry point as any into the grandeur of the full project – and a perfect pick to add to playlists of the best electronic/ambient/new age of 2025.

Before Weingarten enters, Schoen creates a soothing, fairly gentle ride pairing his ambiences with the hypnotic tones of Wendell Hanna’s bass and continuous splashes of an exotic bubble effect. At just over two minutes, Weingarten’s edgy slide guitar enters the soundscape, turning it from a probing exploration into an electronic progressive rock power ballad simmering with deeper emotions. As the piece continues, there’s a dazzling duality between the more haunting sounds of the slide and the seductive bassoon.

Hanna’s gorgeous bassoon also adds a soulful and heartfelt intensity to “Firefly Lament” and “Gyroid Love.” Schoen actually wrote the alternately meditative and quirky “Firefly Lament” with the bassoon in mind, its title coming from Hanna’s website and used to honor her mesmerizing turn on the gently paced tune’s whimsical melody. While Schoen insists that Soulever doesn’t have an overall narrative arc, he composed “Gyroid Love” as an ode to his father Alan, a semi-famous physicist and NASA scientist who made important discoveries around the gyroid – an infinitely connected triply period minimal surface discovered by the elder Schoen in 1970.

To simplify the inspiration, Andrew Schoen says the gyroid is “basically connected to DNA, etc.” One need not understand physics to appreciate the mysterious, hypnotically percussive vibe of the track, which complements its mind-bending ambience, tribal grooves and melancholy bassoon with a computer-generated voice reciting words his father wrote about the gyroid in poetic form.

Also helping bring Schoen’s expansive musical visions to life are Joe Nutter (ukulele), Wayfarer Music President and acclaimed fretless bass artist Sean O’Bryan Smith and trumpeter and flugelhornist Keith Fiala. Nutter brings a plucky earthiness to the jungly, liquid immersion motif and shuffle groove driven exploration “ab-sorp-tion,” the Eastern music tinged dreamscape “Calm Memories” and the buoyant, whimsy-filled semi-symphonic romp “Crossfire.”

While these tracks, along with the gracefully caressing “Ocean Sense” (truly designed to give off a feeling of immersion and water weightlessness) and others like “Culminating,” and the breathtaking, shadowy finale “Sunset in the Rain” (an ode to Schoen’s adopted home region of the Northwest) are perfect reflections of Schoen’s vast evolving artistry, for me, hands down, the most compelling piece is the moody title track “Soulever,” which features O’Bryan Smith’s subtly propulsive rhythms and Fiala’s sensually wafting, jazzy coolness.    

Interestingly, while the title Soulever means “uplift,” “lifting” or “raising” in French, Schoen has long felt that melancholy music is rather uplifting in its own way, so he feels the title track’s downtempo vibe is in line with his overall theme. It’s truly an ambient based masterwork - and will hopefully be the first of many innovative Schoen excursions to come.