Product Description
2 Room With A View
3 The Room Where Everything Changed
4 The Room With No Windows
5 Imaginary Rooms
6 The Room Where We Met
Genres: Ambient, Drone, Classical Crossover, Electroacoustic Improvisation
RIYL: Richard Skelton, Chihei Hatakeyama, Fennesz, Henrik Meierkord
On their debut, Portland Oregon-based Jake Soffer (baritone electric guitar) and Brent Carmer (upright bass) invoke images of confined spaces real and fictional: rooms intertwined with nostalgia, loss, love, and desire. The duo coalesce deep frequencies to create a tapestry as dark and melancholic as it is shimmery and hopeful. Fragments of textured loops sparkle atop the bellowing bows of bass strings. The 57 minutes of Imaginary Rooms’ six electro-acoustic tracks are keys to miniature doors. Some are lost lullabies, others are snapshots from a dream one can't quite remember, some compound in energy before suddenly freezing in time as they scatter into particles of afterthought. The moments of music and memory unfold in real time, revealing a spaciousness that’s meditative, spacey, dark and brooding. The duo's debut collectively pushes towards the indefinite edges of sound, ascending into a dreamlike realm.
Watch Jake and Brent create the title track “Imaginary Rooms” in a live electro-acoustic improvisation at YouTube.
Reviews Editor –
From Chain DLK
Some records you listen to. Others quietly usher you into a room and close the door behind you, leaving you alone with whatever version of yourself shows up. Imaginary Rooms belongs to the latter category, though it has the decency to leave a dim light on, just enough to keep the existential panic at a manageable level.
The Portland-based duo of Jake Soffer and Brent Carmer doesn’t rush to impress, which already puts them ahead of most debut records trying too hard to be “important”. Soffer’s baritone electric guitar dissolves into a low-frequency haze, stretched and processed until it behaves less like an instrument and more like weather. Carmer’s upright bass, bowed with grave patience, feels almost architectural, like load-bearing beams in a structure you can’t quite see but definitely inhabit.
Across its 57 minutes, the album avoids the usual ambient trap of becoming decorative wallpaper. These six pieces have weight. “Lost And Found” opens like a memory trying to assemble itself from fragments, hesitant and flickering. “Room With A View” suggests openness, but not comfort. It’s the kind of view you stare at while thinking about decisions you can’t undo. Then comes “The Room Where Everything Changed”, brief but dense, as if time itself briefly folds in on the sound.
“The Room With No Windows” is the centerpiece and, unsurprisingly, the most suffocating. Not in a cheap, cinematic way, but in that slow, creeping sense of enclosure where sound becomes both companion and boundary. Low-end drones swell and recede like something breathing just out of sight. By the time the title track arrives, there’s a subtle shift: textures begin to shimmer, as if the album is testing the possibility of light without fully committing to it.
Closing with “The Room Where We Met”, the duo leans into a fragile kind of warmth. Not resolution, exactly. More like the faint outline of connection, blurred by time and distance. It doesn’t comfort so much as acknowledge that something once mattered.
What makes Imaginary Rooms quietly compelling is its restraint. There’s no grand gesture, no obvious climax, no desperate need to be memorable. Instead, it trusts accumulation, the slow layering of tone and texture, the way memory itself works when you’re not trying to force it. You don’t “finish” this album so much as exit it, slightly disoriented, carrying traces of spaces that may or may not have existed.
It sits somewhere between the hushed erosion of Richard Skelton, the delicate atmospherics of Chihei Hatakeyama, and the textural patience of Fennesz, but it never feels derivative. If anything, it feels like two musicians carefully mapping an interior geography, one low frequency at a time.
Not a record for multitasking, unless your idea of multitasking involves staring at a wall and reconsidering your life choices. In that case, it’s perfect. -Vito Camarretta
Reviews Editor –
From Obsküre
People meet, share tastes and desires, and ultimately come together to create. An alchemy, an osmosis, a communion of minds and talents is born. Sometimes it hinges on almost nothing, and yet, it works… Imaginary Rooms, released by Projekt on February 27, 2026, is a vibrant testament to a successful alliance between two generous musicians. Indeed, guitarist Jake Soffer and bassist Brent Carmer, both from Portland, Oregon, combined their talents for this album. They produced six elegant, lengthy tracks, some born from improvisations, on which their instruments are treated with care. Thus, this record is akin to a dreamlike journey to the borders of ambient and electroacoustic music, with a touch of classical influence.
Imaginary Rooms unfolds over fifty-seven minutes, slowly and calmly. Each track follows a repetitive structure, offering atmospheric moods with a certain economy of means. At times, an acoustic revelation emerges, the friction of the double bass asserts itself, then recedes (“Room with a View,” “The Room with no Windows”). Similarly, Soffer’s baritone guitar stands out at certain moments, when its sound becomes purer (“The Room where we met”) or escapes through slide playing (“Room with a View”). Nevertheless, we note the extraordinary work of the two men on sonic textures. From then on, the initial sources become less perceptible and merge into a soaring entity, giving a singular relief to their compositions. And it is at this moment that the magic happens…
We then enjoy disconnecting from reality, from precise patterns, from any academic codification. Soffer and Carmer lead us toward a chiaroscuro horizon. We let ourselves drift away, lulled by minimal, looped notes, and hypnosis takes hold. This feeling is particularly pronounced on tracks like “Lost and Found” and “Room with a View.” But while the bright aspect predominates, a kind of gentle darkness also emerges. Thus, “The Room with No Windows” and “Imaginary Rooms” are darker. They lean towards a form of drone, embellished with subtle noise and manipulated field recordings. We sense that the Americans are trying different things, experimenting with various possibilities offered by electronics. The result may be less polished, but it’s remarkable nonetheless.
At the end of this journey, we can only applaud Jake and Brent’s audacity. Indeed, they have managed to get the very best out of both their instruments and the processing techniques at their disposal. Imaginary Rooms is a charming album of rare quality. Here, there are no stylistic flourishes, just the simple desire to deliver refined and harmonious music. The listener is captivated by both the tranquility and the melancholy that emanate from it. The evocations and inspirations give pride of place to the ambient scene of the 2000s, particularly in the last part of “The Room where we met,” which is very close to Fennesz from that era. Other names come to mind, such as Henrik Meierkord or Richard Skelton… This splendid work, although not without a few minor flaws, is truly a treat for the ears! These guys are definitely ones to watch. -Olivier Bernard Wirth