Textural hip-hop collages in synesthetic motion

On Collection of Sounds 4, Ant delivers a sprawling auditory mood board that feels less like a beat tape and more like a speculative documentary on how music and memory intertwine. The album’s strength lies not in hooks or choruses but in how it curates atmosphere, texture, and emotion using loops, samples, static, and space. This record is fascinated with perception—sound as color, rhythm as memory, music as synesthetic architecture.

From the opening track, “Hearing in Dark Colors,” Ant invites the listener into a deeply visual soundscape. A voice—equal parts host and hallucination—asks: What do you hear when you see this color? In response, instruments don’t answer so much as ripple. A violin cycles slowly around a muttering bassline, each pass bending like sunlight through a window. A faint twitter of hi-hats nests in the far corners, fluttering like birds startled from wires. These elements aren’t stacked; they are suspended, circling each other in a low-gravity atmosphere where nothing quite lands, but everything shimmers.

Throughout the album, Ant explores restraint not as minimalism, but as an invitation. “Darker Colors” pivots around a single piano note—repeating like a finger tapped against glass—before shifting without warning into a new key, nudged along by subtle hi-hats and skeletal percussion. Each instrument feels like it’s waiting for the others to finish their thought, entering only when the air clears. There’s tension in that patience.

On “All Right—Now, Listen,” Ant reanimates a classic Black Sabbath sample, flipping Ozzy Osbourne’s cough from Sweet Leaf into a similar intro, a post-industrial exhale. But instead of doubling down on aggression, the track dissolves into molasses—guitar notes drag like slow-motion sparks across thick bass. Echoes of Osbourne’s “alright now” and “won’t you listen” bounce like lost thoughts, distorting the familiarity into something dreamlike.

“Prelude Revisited” plays like muscle memory—tight, percussive claps mapped over a warping bassline that seems to bend with heat. A high-tuned electric guitar coils around the rhythm, not soloing but snaking, threading itself through the song’s fabric. The real drama here is in the tension between tones—how one distorted element flickers just as another fades, like watching streetlights blink off in sequence.

In more meditative moments like “Behind the Sound,” Ant grounds the track with a melodic piano that seems to hover just above the floorboards. An acoustic guitar laces through it gently, never quite playing melody or harmony, but offering texture—as if strumming the dust off an old room. Claps fall like footsteps. The bass doesn’t walk so much as breathe in slow, lungful pulses. The interplay is cinematic without being grandiose, music as ambient recollection.

“Just Another Three A.M.” captures insomnia with startling clarity. The electric guitar is drenched in delay, each note echoing into its own tail like it’s chasing a note it just forgot. Underneath, a sustained synth tone stretches out like fog over asphalt. Electronic squeaks and aquatic panning effects drift in and out like phantoms, giving the piece the narcotic fluidity of a dream melting into morning. It’s a hallucination built from clean lines and smeared edges.

Later, “Side Eight Synesthesia” takes the concept literally, layering a string section that pulses one note to the next like the blinking of colored Christmas lights. The electric guitar’s melody folds underneath, slow and inquisitive. Then, a voice describes the very phenomenon—imagine if music could be seen—and with that cue, the prior samples from the album are stitched back into view like fragments of a mural. A drum loop rises from the undercurrent, firm and present, grounding what was previously ethereal. It’s the album’s spine—the moment where the abstract touches solid ground.

By the final track, “Coloring, Shading and Endings,” Ant throws open the windows. Everything previously hinted at—twinkling pianos, full drum kits, sunbeam synths—arrives in one swirling blend. The drums here are distinctly alive, more studio performance than pad loop, while a playful electric guitar punctuates the rhythm with sunny rejoicing. A voice coos “la la la” in the corner like a child spinning in circles. Even the static—once ghostly—now feels celebratory. Samples of interviews and strange non-sequiturs weave in and out, not to confuse, but to complete. Like found footage spliced into a family film reel, it doesn’t matter if it makes sense—what matters is that it feels true.

Collection of Sounds 4 is less about beats and more about the space between them. It’s an album that listens back—holding its breath while you adjust your ears, asking not just what you hear, but what you see when you listen. In Ant’s hands, sound becomes memory, becomes color, becomes motion—a swirling, soft-spoken masterpiece of restraint, resonance, and radiant disorder.