Lumine

LP version. Quiet Ends is the second album by Lumine, the trio of Graham Stewart, John Whyte and Timo van Luijk, released by La Scie Dorée in May 2019 in an edition of 350 copies with a download card and a postcard. Stewart and Whyte have worked together since the mid eighties in the Canadian group Violence and the Sacred. Van Luijk runs La Scie Dorée, records alone as Af Ursin and is one half of both In Camera, with Christoph Heemann, and Elodie, with Andrew Chalk. The first Lumine album, All the Unnamed, came out on the same label in 2017.

Stewart and van Luijk played, recorded and mixed the music at Kulta Saha, van Luijk's studio, between 2017 and 2018, while Whyte made the sleeve drawing, the design and the text that goes with it. Five pieces are spread over the two sides: Shoreline, Greenock Harbour and Night on the first, then the thirteen-minute Empty Streets and Skyline on the second. The titles trace a coast and a harbour town at nightfall, and the sleeve drawing, a view over dark rooftops into a pale sky, sets the same scene.

The label describes an isolationist landscape in the half tones of twilight, where the penumbra spreads mysterious textures and a melancholic, hypnotic mood that turns the listener inward, and where every troubling detail of reality melts into large masses and abstract surfaces. Af Ursin's Itinera, also recorded by van Luijk at Kulta Saha in those same years, makes a natural companion.