Progressive Rock
Unsung Records · 17 October 2025
“Heartless Heart” (5:05) opens on a steady pulse and a treated voice that never quite becomes a voice, and that already tells you how Sky On The Ground was made: the raw material is improvisations Markus Reuter had been recording between 1998 and 2025, and the two of them turned that into eleven tracks and forty minutes at the Ritmo&Blu studio Castagna runs in Brescia, between December 2024 and March 2025.
Both of them sing, which neither had done on his own records before, and when they do it is through a vocoder and Auto-Tune, so the voice ends up working as one more layer of texture rather than as a performer. It pays off best on “Overlove” (5:01), where brass opens out the atmosphere with the processed vocal in the middle; “The Shape Of Tomorrow” (3:31) goes the other way and hits electronic pop far more squarely than either name would lead you to expect.
Reuter is best known for touch guitar, and the touch guitar is exactly what he keeps in the background here: he plays harmonium, glockenspiel and nylon- and steel-string acoustics, on top of the electric guitar that comes out of the archive. Castagna handles bass, programming and keyboards, and takes the production and arrangement credits. The stated idea is magical realism — the extraordinary and the everyday sharing a room without a seam — with My Life in the Bush of Ghosts and Brian Eno’s Another Day on Earth as acknowledged touchstones. Erik Emil Eskildsen mastered it.
The source material is Reuter’s and spans twenty-seven years; the shape it ended up with belongs to Castagna’s studio, and the distance between archive and song is one the record never quite accounts for. And the vocal treatment, which is the genuinely new element, is applied identically across all eleven tracks: what is a discovery on “Overlove” is, by the time “Pulse Of Life” (4:11) comes round, simply the house timbre.
Eleven tracks and forty minutes, out on Unsung Records (UR026) on 17 October 2025 on vinyl, CD, cassette and digital. It is the duo’s second record after Sea of Hopeless Angels (2023).
Rating: 7/10
Text by Guillem Cardós