New Zealand ambient-pop collective Phoebe Rings presents their debut LP Aseurai, arriving June 6th, 2025 via P-Vine Records. The ten-track album emerges as meditative exploration of distance and presence, weaving dream-pop sensibilities through ambient textures that blur temporal and spatial boundaries.
Evolving from Choi's original solo vision into collaborative endeavor, Phoebe Rings constructs Aseurai through layered compositional processes where individual voices merge into singular atmospheric statement. The album's Korean title - "around you in the atmosphere, hard to reach, fading away" - captures the work's preoccupation with liminal spaces and the quality of memory as it dissolves into ambient consciousness.
Aseurai functions as sonic meditation on impermanence and connection. Where earlier releases inhabited purely ethereal territories, this album grounds its atmospheric investigations in specific emotional geographies - moments of urban displacement, mental health struggles, and cross-cultural longing rendered through ambient processing and dreamy instrumental arrangements.
The title track "Aseurai" suspends Choi's Korean vocals within clouds of synthesized atmosphere, creating space where language itself becomes textural element rather than semantic communication. "Get Up" transforms personal struggle into ambient mantra, its disco rhythms softened into hypnotic pulses. "Fading Star" stretches jazz-influenced guitar lines across expansive ambient backdrops, while "Drifting" captures celestial romance through floating bass patterns and gossamer synthesizer work.
Recorded across various locations in Tāmaki Makaurau (Auckland) during 2023-2024, the album benefits from Jeremy Toy's mixing approach, which emphasizes spatial depth and atmospheric cohesion. Kelly Hibbert's mastering preserves the work's dynamic range while maintaining its dreamlike qualities.
Through careful attention to ambient space and temporal suspension, Phoebe Rings creates music that exists in perpetual state of becoming rather than arrival - compositions that invite contemplative listening while exploring themes of cultural memory, emotional distance, and the possibility of connection across impossible spaces.