https://umlaut.work/contact daily 0.75 2022-04-10 https://umlaut.work/about daily 0.75 2025-12-09 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6251a97d0455065f4dfef21f/89880f7d-3f8b-4997-b40a-1132e26d3434/Jeff+12.9.2025+B%2BW.jpg About - Ümlaut is Jeff Düngfelder, a U.S. experimental composer/sound artist now based in the northern Connecticut countryside. The thematic concepts distinguishing his work are absence and silence; the ineffable exchange between viewer and image; random moments of stillness within a landscape in flux. Using a minimalistic, electro-acoustic approach, his elusive patchwork of field recordings and electronics merge the world of shadows and colours. His memory recordings expose the complex relationship between music and silence. In addition to his solo recordings as Ümlaut, Jeff Düngfelder mixes his own electronica with downtempo and jazz elements as a member of Intelligent Life, the trio that equally features Mike Brown on contrabass, and Joshua Trinidad on trumpet. https://umlaut.work/new-album daily 0.75 2022-04-09 https://umlaut.work/reviews daily 0.75 2026-07-03 https://umlaut.work/home daily 1.0 2026-07-26 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6251a97d0455065f4dfef21f/47c52a2e-89bb-427b-b94f-88adddbf2731/HipstamaticPhoto-665415955.966657.jpg Home - electronica : : ambient : : minimal : : experimental https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6251a97d0455065f4dfef21f/db0f3ad6-295d-4798-a272-4e97566902b9/%C3%9Cmlaut+-+Listening+from+%28the%29+Inside+%282026%29.jpg Home - Ümlaut LISTENING FROM (THE) INSIDE This album grew out of listening at home—paying close attention to the quiet systems, routines, and environmental sounds that shape everyday life, and to the unexpected patterns and textures that emerge when those sounds are carefully observed. It is part of an ongoing collaborative series exploring the relationship between sound and place, in which each edition invites an artist to translate a specific location into sound—an audio geography shaped by proximity, duration, and personal perception. For this contribution, I focused on the domestic interior of my home in Weatogue, Connecticut, surrounded by the quiet of the countryside. The material is drawn from everyday systems and subtle activity within the house, alongside the faint presence of the landscape beyond it. These sounds are reshaped and layered, moving between sustained atmospheres and more detailed passages, where rhythm, pulse, noise, and repetition form slowly evolving structures. The home is treated both as a lived-in space and as an acoustic framework. Rooms shape and filter sound, surfaces hold resonance, and elements from outside—weather, distance, night—move gently across the threshold. Mechanical cycles and environmental textures interact with glitch processes and considered uses of noise, producing a listening environment rich in variation and detail. As with the series as a whole, this work encourages attentive listening. Place is approached not as something fixed or purely calm, but as active and continually unfolding through use, repetition, and time. The album invites the listener to remain with these sounds as they shift, combine, and reveal new patterns within a familiar space. Underlying the album are quiet field recordings drawn from everyday domestic environments: the low hum of a refrigerator, the pulse of a microwave, water moving through a kitchen sink, tea brought slowly to a boil, distant television sound, the steady breath of a furnace, rain against a window, the measured click of a metronome, the acoustics of a bathroom, and the indistinct textures of night. These familiar sounds are reduced, stretched, and recontextualised, allowing the ordinary to become abstract—heard not as objects, but as atmosphere, memory, and time passing. SITE is a collaborative conceptual series curated by Driftworks and Audiobulb Records, exploring the relationship between sound and place. Each edition invites artists to recreate their personal perception of a location, blending environmental sounds and imagery to capture the unique ‘audio-geography’ of our world. Through SITE, artists transform their experiences of place into immersive soundscapes and visual narratives, offering listeners a new way to connect with the environments around them. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6251a97d0455065f4dfef21f/18319cbf-0beb-4ac5-924b-a36427bf3a71/Error+Bloom.jpg Home - Ümlaut ERROR BLOOM There is no stable signal here—only states in transition. “Error Bloom” moves through a sequence of reductions: underrun, drift, fault. What begins as structure gradually thins, leaving behind traces—residue, degrade, unstable. Each piece isolates a condition, a small failure in continuity, where sound begins to slip from form into behavior. These are not compositions in the traditional sense, but processes held in suspension. Micro-events surface and dissolve: a fragment repeats until it erodes, a texture holds until it collapses into grain. The system does not break—it recalibrates, continuously, quietly. As the sequence unfolds, the frame widens. Field emerges not as space, but as accumulation. Error is no longer interruption, but presence. What remains becomes perceptual—afterimage: a faint imprint carried forward, even as the source disappears. The final state does not resolve. Loop returns the system to its origin, not as repetition, but as re-entry—shifted, unstable, and already in motion. This is a music of thresholds and residuals, of sound reduced to condition, of failure as a form of continuity. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6251a97d0455065f4dfef21f/bd23d2df-38ac-40d4-a1d0-8f25d174955b/After+Ambient+%28small%29.jpg Home - Ümlaut AFTER AMBIENT After Ambient marks a decisive departure from the conventions of ambient music, exploring what remains when melody, harmony, and atmosphere are stripped to their essential elements. Across seven minimalist compositions, Ümlaut constructs immersive sonic spaces from fractured tape loops, isolated synthesizer frequencies, musique concrète, dissonant percussion, unstable drones, and extended passages of calculated silence. Rather than offering atmosphere as comfort, these works treat sound as architecture, revealing spaces that feel simultaneously physical and psychological. Inspired by the sonic language of avant-garde cinema and experimental electroacoustic practice, each composition unfolds like an unseen film—not a soundtrack accompanying images, but one capable of generating its own. Narrative is suggested rather than stated. Sounds emerge without explanation, disappear before resolution, and leave behind traces that linger in the imagination. Silence becomes an active presence, shaping the contours of each piece as profoundly as the sounds themselves. Tape manipulation, microtonality, industrial textures, and silence function not as effects but as compositional materials. Fragments drift in and out of focus, drones shift almost imperceptibly, and fleeting gestures interrupt extended passages of stillness. The result is music that resists linear development, favoring ambiguity, tension, and slow transformation over conventional structure. Rather than seeking emotional resolution, After Ambient inhabits uncertainty, inviting deep listening through restraint, dissonance, and the expressive power of what remains unsaid. Each composition opens a space where perception becomes fluid, encouraging the listener to engage not only with what is heard, but also with what is implied, remembered, and left deliberately absent. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6251a97d0455065f4dfef21f/1e013a8c-87d9-4fb1-bbd1-50873e917631/Metamorphoses+Cover+Art+%28small%29.jpg Home - OdNu + Ümlaut METAMORPHOSES With Metamorphoses, OdNu + Ümlaut enter a deeper phase of their shared language, extending the quiet revelations of Abandoned Spaces and the weightless drift of Mitochondria Johatsu into a single, continuous form. What once unfolded in fragments and interwoven vignettes is here distilled into a 60-minute arc—unbroken, patient, and alive—where time itself becomes elastic, dissolving into a slow and luminous becoming. The genesis of the work reflects its essence. Jeff Düngfelder began by shaping a foundational environment: a longform expanse of tape loops, electronics, and shifting layers of processed sound. This initial gesture was less a composition than a terrain—an atmosphere suspended in motion, rich with space and possibility. Into this living field, Michel Mazza entered, responding intuitively with electric guitar, electronics, and a deeply attuned sense of form. His improvisations do not sit atop the foundation but permeate it—bending, refracting, and reimagining its contours—until the distinction between origin and response disappears entirely. What emerges is a true synthesis: not a dialogue, but a transformation. The identities of both artists dissolve into a shared current, where sound is continuously reshaped, reabsorbed, and reborn. Textures bloom and recede like breath; tones flicker at the edge of perception; fragments of melody surface only to slip back beneath the surface. There is a quiet, almost gravitational pull to the music—drawing the listener inward, encouraging a state of attention that is both meditative and fluid. Like the album’s artwork—where translucent forms overlap, merge, and evolve in soft gradients of light and shadow—Metamorphoses exists in a state of perpetual transition. Nothing is fixed. Boundaries blur. Shapes become gestures; gestures become space. Warmth and density give way to air and suspension, only to gather again in new and unexpected configurations. The music moves as water moves, as wind reshapes the surface of a landscape—subtly, persistently, without urgency yet never still. In this sense, Metamorphoses is not simply a composition, but a process unfolding in real time. It invites the listener not to follow, but to inhabit—to drift within its currents, to lose the markers of beginning and end, and to experience sound as a living, shifting presence. It is the sound of transformation itself: gradual, inevitable, and quietly profound. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6251a97d0455065f4dfef21f/3988c886-4014-44db-bce1-503829aaa770/Qualia+ART+BC.jpg Home - Intelligent Life QUALIA The seductive new album by Intelligent Life is an immersion into suchness. Composed during the dead of winter, with hints of jazz, ambient and downtempo, each of the eleven tracks offers the listener a subjectively conscious encounter, wherein experience and ultimate reality are inseparable. Trinidad’s ethereal trumpet interwoven with Brown’s soulful contrabass and Düngfelder’s meticulous arrangement of electronic nuances inhabit both the acoustic and electronic worlds. Within a framework of nondualism, qualia explores the interconnectedness and unified entirety of all things. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6251a97d0455065f4dfef21f/c9ead048-27d7-4d05-ab6c-840e45b9e055/Listening+Pearls+48+Main+Art.jpg Home - Listening Pearls Radio Show 48: Sunday September 13th Listening Pearls is my monthly radio show, broadcasting direct from the revolutionary arts facility high in the French Pyrenees. Featuring new and upcoming ambient, electronic, experimental, modern classical and minimal music releases. The August 16th Show is now playing on MIXCLOUD. The next LIVE Listening Pearls show will be on Sunday September 13th. 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