Bandcamp Most records we measure have been squeezed. Not ruined, usually, just tidied into a narrower band than the performance was, because that is how music gets made now. Whiteout has not. Across five instrumental pieces it opens between fifteen and twenty four decibels between its quietest and its loudest passages, every single track, and the effect is immediate: this is a record you have to turn up for the quiet parts and then live with when it arrives.
Zupermoon are a trio from Mainz: Jona Münch on guitar, Julius Reich on bass and synth, Felix Rieß on drums, who also made the cover. Whiteout follows a self-titled record and a live album, Simon Backes wrote the orchestral arrangements, and Jan Kerscher recorded, mixed and mastered it at Ghost City Recordings. It is entirely instrumental, which they say plainly rather than leaving you to notice, and at thirty nine minutes across five tracks nothing here is in a hurry.
What the space is for
“Endurance” opens the record on eight minutes that spend most of their first half barely there. Clean guitar, a lot of room, and a build that is patient to the point of being a dare. When it lands it lands properly, and the reason it works is that the quiet section was genuinely quiet rather than quiet-shaped.
“Nilas” does the opposite thing and is the one the band themselves flagged. It is the brightest piece here and the one that swings widest of all, from almost nothing to a full wall, and it is the track that will sell this band to anybody who likes their post-rock with teeth.
Between them sits “Favorite Dream”, which is where I would actually start. Acoustic guitar carries most of it, it is the quietest and warmest thing on the record, and the lead playing that arrives in its second half has more personality than anything else here. In a genre with a strong pull towards the same four chords and a crescendo, a band willing to spend eight minutes on something this understated is making a choice.
Where it is ordinary
The shape. Four of these five follow the same arc: hushed opening, long accumulation, heavy payoff, exit. It is a good arc and they execute it well, but by the fourth time you can feel the architecture before you hear it. “Groundfloor Machinery” is the one that suffers, because it holds the narrowest range on the album and arrives third, after two tracks that have already shown you the trick.
The low end is the other thing. Every track carries a quarter to nearly a third of its energy down below 250 hertz, which is where the doomgaze part of the description comes from, and in the densest passages the kick has to fight the guitars for the same ground.
So
Recommended. The playing is good, the production is genuinely unusual in a way that serves the music rather than showing off, and in a month where almost everything we have measured has been held at a fixed level, a German trio choosing to let their record breathe is worth pointing at. The arc repeats more than it should across five tracks, which is the sort of thing a second album fixes. Start with “Favorite Dream” and then go back to the beginning.
This is the most consistently dynamic record in our measurement archive, and it is not close: it is the only one of the twenty six albums measured so far where every track opens more than twelve decibels between its quietest and loudest passages, and here the floor is 15.7. All five tracks open between 15.7 and 24.0 decibels between their quietest and loudest passages, with “Nilas” at 24.0 and “Endurance” at 23.4 as the extremes, and nothing has been pushed to the wall: average levels sit between -12.1 and -15.4 decibels. “Favorite Dream” is the outlier in the other direction: the quietest track at -15.4, the highest peak-to-average distance at 15.4, the lowest tonal centre at 1532 hertz and the most low midrange on the album at 19.2 percent, all of which is consistent with an acoustic guitar carrying the arrangement. “Nilas” is the brightest at 2275 hertz. The constant is the bottom: between 25.3 and 29.8 percent of total energy sits below 250 hertz on every track, which is a lot for post-rock and is where the heavier half of the description comes from.
Standout tracks: Favorite Dream, Nilas, Endurance
