Saapato
Seasons Turn Like Pages
Window Sill / Aural Canyon
In a culture where virtually everything has been commodified, even the idea of chill increasingly feels like an assembly-line product. The tech industry is flooding the market with meditation apps. Wellness influencers are promising inner peace to all those who buy their tinctures and concoctions. Monied suburbanites are reorienting their lives around the latest yoga craze. And ambient music? It’s going gangbusters like never before, prompting artists from across the musical spectrum—many of them total hacks—to try their hand at various forms of anodyne bliss.
The resulting glut—which the music press likes to optimistically frame as an “ambient boom” every six months or so—has undoubtedly grown the audience for chilled-out sounds. Yet it’s also given rise to an environment in which artists like Saapato are now competing for attention with a seemingly endless stream of slapped-together, aesthetically unchallenging collections of sleep-inducing audio wallpaper.
To his credit, the New York-based artist hasn’t complained about the crowded landscape in which he’s found himself. Over the past few years, he’s quietly carved out a niche of his own, one which relies heavily on delicate melodies and nature sounds, with many of the latter coming from field recordings he’s collected from various pockets of the US. Those recordings, in fact, often take center stage in his work; last year’s In Alaska was rooted in time spent exploring the wilds of Juneau, 2024’s On Fire Island stemmed from a residency with the National Park Service and let’s just say that the title of his Decomposition: Fox on a Highway album was very literal.
The inspiration behind his latest release, Seasons Turn Like Pages, is far less specific, but the record pays homage to the quiet majesty that exists in even the most humble corners of the natural world. Gentle but never cloying, the LP unfurls at a leisurely pace, but between the abundance of forest sounds and the warm glow of Saapato’s synthesizer tones, the music never ceases to feel distinctly alive. The song titles certainly help to paint a bucolic picture, and listening to the placid chords of “Salamanders Rise from Their Burrows” and the gentle splashing of “Water Snake,” one can’t help but notice just how much wonder has been woven into these tunes.
More than anything, that wonder is what separates Seasons Turn Like Pages from the chain-store meditation soundtracks and the faceless compilations of field recordings. There’s a genuine sense of earnestness at the record’s core, and while most adults have long forgotten the days when tromping through the woods and turning over rocks at the edge of a pond was a great way to spend an afternoon, Saapato appears determined to keep approaching his surroundings with the wide-eyed curiosity of an inquisitive child.