The Berlin-Based Guitarist Turns Instrumental Restraint Into A Quiet Meditation On Chaos And Calm
listen to the article
Marcel Flendrie’s Awakened Arms moves with the patience of someone listening for what sits beneath the note. Across four instrumental pieces, the debut EP unfolds in quiet gestures: fingerpicked guitar, piano, bass, electric texture, and the occasional drum appearing not as decoration, but as small shifts in weather. Recorded at Berlin’s Famous Gold Watch Studios with producer Cameron James Laing, the project feels intimate without closing itself off, spacious without losing its human grain.
Marcel Flendrie arrives at this music through instinct rather than explanation. “I think my way is not trying to understand everything, but relying on the beauty and depth of the human mind and soul,” he reflects, and that trust gives Awakened Arms its emotional shape. The pieces began as home-recorded demos, carrying the unpolished presence of everyday life before being reimagined in the studio. What remains is a sense of discovery: music not forced into meaning, but allowed to reveal it slowly.
The opening title track sets the EP’s tone with an unhurried fingerpicked melody that seems to breathe in place. Every note feels considered, but never precious. Flendrie and Laing give the piece room to open, letting harmonic colour gather gradually around the guitar. It moves between vulnerability and steadiness, as if testing how much feeling can be held inside restraint.
From there, the EP begins to shift toward light. The second track introduces subtle distortion at the edges, suggesting an awakening not as a sudden revelation, but as something arriving through fog. Its movement is delicate, yet charged, finding clarity without breaking the spell of the record’s quiet interior world.
The wonderfully titled “Zen & Chaos lie close together on a bed of thorned Roses”
deepens the EP’s meditative pull. A lo-fi beat supports a steady central guitar motif, giving the piece a quiet rhythmic spine while other guitar voices move around it with looser, more interpretive phrasing. The result is not chaos in the dramatic sense, but coexistence: structure and drift, repetition and improvisation, calm and complication sharing the same space.
By the closing piece, the music returns to a deeper calm. The guitar hums with a sense of acceptance, holding both longing and release in the same breath. It feels less like an ending than a settling: the sound of an instrument becoming comfortable with its own silence.
Flendrie’s influences are wide-ranging, from Jonny Greenwood and Paco de Lucía to Philip Glass, but Awakened Arms does not announce them loudly. Their presence is more atmospheric than referential, absorbed into the music’s sense of space, repetition, and touch. The result is a debut that feels shaped by a lifetime of listening without becoming beholden to any single lineage.
The setting matters, too. Famous Gold Watch Studios, housed in a former East German security facility, lends the recording an unspoken gravity. Its history, noir character, and independent spirit give the EP a fitting home: a place where quiet music can carry weight without needing to raise its voice.
With Awakened Arms, Marcel Flendrie offers an instrumental debut built on nuance rather than spectacle. It is music for the fragile border between chaos and calm, where beauty arrives not through grand arrival, but through attention. These pieces linger because they understand stillness as an active force, one capable of holding memory, uncertainty, and grace in the same small room.
If you would like to submit your music for playlist or feature consideration, please submit here via our partnership with MusoSoup.
