If you’ve followed The Kiss That Took A Trip over the years, you already know that M.D. Trello is much more of a world-builder than a songwriter. But with his latest sprawling odyssey ‘Horror Vacui’, he drags you through a kaleidoscope of twenty years’ worth of sonic obsessions, stitched together with the disjointed logic of a fever dream and the conviction of a composer who refuses to colour inside any line ever drawn.
This new piece is a single track, though it behaves more like a suite, and is Trello at his most uninhibited. Absent are the tidy rules of conventional structure; in their place, a constantly morphing landscape where post-rock vistas collapse into gauzy ambience, only for a jolt of noise or a burst of pastel-toned indie-pop to push the music into yet another unexpected direction. ‘Horror Vacui’ is restless, delirious, and deeply alive, like tuning a radio that’s haunted by one artist’s entire catalogue.
Trello’s history weighs proudly on the piece. Fans will catch echoes of his early ambient wanderings, the jagged edges of his noisier periods, the melodic clarity that emerged midway through his discography, and the search for warmth that marked his most recent LP. But nothing here feels recycled. Instead, it’s as though all those eras have been poured into a single vessel and stirred until their boundaries dissolve.
What makes this release thrilling is its refusal to settle. One minute you’re floating through a mist of synths; the next, you’re plunged into a churning, distorted passage that feels like a storm forming in real time. Smooth transitions give way to sudden detours, yet the whole journey feels guided by his own unmistakable ear for mood, that uncanny ability to make even the strangest turns feel strangely inevitable.
And for an artist who’s long rejected genre cages, ‘Horror Vacui’ stands as his boldest argument yet that music can thrive outside any predefined container. It’s maximalist without being cluttered, emotional without being sentimental, and experimental without being impenetrable. The piece radiates with the momentum of someone reclaiming lost time, a triumphant return after years of personal and technical setbacks.
Two decades into the project, The Kiss That Took A Trip still sounds like no one else. And with ‘Horror Vacui’, Trello detonates his catalogue, remixes the fragments mid-air, and turns the whole explosion into something startlingly beautiful. A full-spectrum storm from one of alt-music’s most quietly visionary makers.