Santpoort - Ocean Tales

You can’t go home again, but Julien Mier attempts to whenever he records as Santpoort. The Sydney-based producer / vocalist, composer, and visual artist mentally and musically revisits his Netherlands hometown of Santpoort, a small coastal village of lush, green forests bordered by sloping sand dunes, with each project. “I draw inspiration from a place that I haven’t been for so long,” Julien says. “That creates this feeling of nostalgia and melancholy in my music.”

Since 2018’s picturebook, Julien has crafted a wistful, poignant blend of softly knocking beat music and lo-fi, psychedelic pop under the Santpoort alias. Each self-illustrated album cover is an invitation to join him in a sonic world of sepia-hued memories, some vivid and others rapidly fading away. They are the scores to reflective sojourns into the wilderness, the hikes that find you navigating nature as much as the fragmented past and uncertain future.

Ocean Tales, Julien’s second Santpoort album on Friends of Friends, takes another step into his past while artistically leaping forward. Steel-toned kalimba melodies that glint like sunlight on crystalline waves, poignant piano, resonant bass lines, soulful blues guitar — Julien plays them all to create richer, more layered lo-fi compositions of hip-hop, electronic, ambient, and blissful psych-pop, accenting many with chirping birds and recorded sounds from nature. He also collaborates with musicians like Canadian electronic duo Tennyson and Sydney songstress Little Green, the dewy-eyed lyrics of everyone involved conveying the inherent longing at the center of Julien’s Santpoort project more powerfully than ever before.