Can a musician move incessantly between genres that are apparently antithetical to each other, always offering above-average works? The answer is yes, especially if one’s name is Déhà, a name that is now synonymous with the innate ability to combine restlessness and compositional hyperactivity with a quality that surprises more and more. Under the moniker Aurora Borealis, the Belgian musician explores ambient territories that flow into a delicate and emotional post-rock, the kind that every fan would always like to hear but which, strangely enough, most other musicians only manage to offer with such mastery intermittently. Thanks to an almost infinite talent, Déhà offers a little less than three quarters of an hour of splendid melodies of astonishing depth, in the sense that you never get tired of listening to them and, above all, they never seem cloying. In the first two parts of Goodbye (all in one track), which if I understand correctly should have been composed some time before the rest of the album, one immediately hears what is the primary influence of those who try their hand at ambient music, Brian Eno, whose piano notes are reminiscent of a masterpiece such as By This River, and a flash of memory makes me remember that one of the undisputed geniuses of contemporary music, though of English nationality, is of Belgian mother, something that in fact is irrelevant but that I like to believe is not entirely accidental. I don’t know if this initial influence is conscious or not, the fact is that as the album proceeds the more full-bodied and atmospheric atmospheres of post-rock become preponderant compared to the rarefactions of ambient, respecting in some way also the temporal progression of the compositions that seem to become more and more robust, arriving to the most recent and conclusive Sun Up and Sun Down, which are reached in stages, with the most recent parts of Goodbye that, previously, have made a little less dreamy the pace of an album possessing a melodic afflatus difficult to find elsewhere. A purely instrumental album runs the serious risk of being boring after about twenty minutes, but if you’re called Déhà this can’t happen, because wherever the Belgian musician moves, the predictable and banal things are banned, and every listener, whatever the genre he prefers, will always be satisfied with every release. And this is not for everyone.

2018 – Independent