Kauneus – Kauneus

There is no comfort to be found in the debut release from Kauneus, the anonymous Portuguese duo who label their music death blues but drift with intent through ambient terrain. This is not ambient in the soothing, background sense — this is ambient as erosion, ambient as haunting, ambient as reminder. Across three tracks, Kauneus constructs a world from decay and silence, breath and memory. It lingers. It stains.

“Assim falava o senhor Zaratusta” opens the EP with a heavy philosophical undercurrent. While its title nods to Richard Strauss, the reference is more accurately aimed at Friedrich Nietzsche’s prophetic novel. The music itself rejects Strauss’s grandiosity in favour of something far more intimate and unsettling. There are no crescendos, no orchestral swells — only slow, disjointed pulses that suggest thought unravelling, ideas collapsing into themselves. The track breathes like a dying organism, each sound a quiet protest against meaninglessness. It doesn’t interpret Nietzsche; it listens to him dissolving in real time.

“O silêncio segundo Orfeu” begins with the eerie texture of a vinyl record spun in reverse — warped, ghostly, and almost hallucinatory. The piece soon settles into something more sinister: a sonic hallucination that feels recorded in an abandoned hospital. Echoes flicker like faulty fluorescent lights, while space becomes its instrument. The silence referenced in the title isn’t peace, but absence — the silence of doors that will never open again, of voices long gone. It’s Orpheus returning, not from the underworld, but from a memory that refuses to stay buried.

“Fragmentos da anatomia da melancolia” closes the record with a gothic unease that borders on nightmarish. There’s something strangely retro about it, calling to mind the soundtracks of early first-person shooters like Doom or Wolfenstein 3D, where horror met pixelated violence in claustrophobic corridors. The track feels like wandering through a haunted house built from memory and myth, where every corner hides something rotting, yet vaguely familiar. It is playfully grim, unsettlingly fun, and layered with just enough menace to stay in your bones.

Kauneus doesn’t just avoid genre — they seem actively hostile to it. This EP is ambient music that rejects passivity, experimental sound that offers no resolution. It’s philosophy rendered as mood, mood rendered as ruin. Beauty and terror, fused in silence. (8/10) (Own Production)