Release Date: 16 December 2025
Song Count: 8
Rating: 7.8/10
Description:
Surprise! A rare occurence of an album being reviewed on the site on the exact same day it was released - and this time from a Greek electronic music duo that has already been featured previously, as ONE ARC DEGREE has put out a brand new album, Emergence, with a new batch of 8 songs in their signature space-like ambient style. Fun fact: this album is so recent that, combined with the duo in general being rather niche and unknown, I actually failed to find an image of the cover art online, and had to resort to putting my own screenshot of the cover into an image uploader to get it onto this Blogger post. It is a bit of a shame, given it is a very visually pleasing album cover.
Similar to a lot of the project's previous releases, Emergence is an album that radiates peace, lightness and tranquility through its sound without sounding overly caught up in its own energy or negatively lulling. The theme of simple dance beats and rhythms coexisting alongside stretched-sounding synths and electronic bits continues as the entrancing and floating melodic musical layers ebb and flow along like calm waves of the sea, all culminating together into another instance of the music feeling naturally ambient and suited as a backing soundtrack without outright boring the listener or making its prolonged exposure unpleasant over time like a lot of other ambient projects can end up becoming.
In this way, it fits right into the style ONE ARC DEGREE has established for itself over the course of its existence; the soundscape the album provides feels like a natural continuation of the duo's honed-in style of longer cosmic ambient songs with relatively quiet techno-esque beats on top. The best examples of this sound within Emergence include the tracks "Omniverse", "Stellarator" and "Celestial Wheel" - all three being songs where the rhythms are most prominent and playing a dominant role in the music whilst still not taking away from the meditative sound overall, instead synergising with everything else at play matchingly.
I would rate Emergence roughly to the same level as their 2023 work The Forest and the Milky Way, as it naturally shares much of the same elements within its music and grants an equal level of enjoyment, which is especially an impressive feat coming from albums made for purposes of ambience like these, as they rarely end up in the sweet-spot where they both feel ambient and simultaneously enrichening to listen to for longer than one song's worth of length, but both albums manage to pull it off quite well. I have said previously that I was "interested in the past, present and future endeavours" of ONE ARC DEGREE as a result of listening to and rating their release from two and a half years ago, and the subsequent verdict of mine upon checking out this one is that it more than paid off overall.