EP Review: Earthside

Ambient soundscape artist Ash Sales heads into the New Zealand bush and emerges with a beautiful collection of hand foraged songs for his new EP Earthside. The cover image depicts a dark and eerie tree with its roots spreading and splaying over a giant rock visage. This mirrors the soundscapes of each of the tracks as they slowly take their time to build a foundation in your ears, mind and body until you feel fully enveloped like the rock itself and in a meditative state.

Microcosm is completely otherworldly yet gives you a small taste of what’s to come on the EP. Ash truly understands the songwriting within his genre. With ambient releases like these, everything must be pointing in the same direction, so it’s no surprise, and with a name like Microcosm, even the track duration is the shortest of the EP.

Clocking in at over 8 minutes and almost double the runtime of Microcosm, on Sunrise, you can feel that early morning chill that comes before the morning light. It’s a hopeful song like waiting for a new day to begin. The execution of the song title to mood and feeling coexist perfectly together here.

Mist is full of Ash’s delicate acoustic embellishments. He is a guitarist first and foremost and a great loop pedal artist at that. Mist is a masterclass in building up a song, layer by layer, and having it take on new meanings towards the end, while keeping the initial groundwork intact.

Earthling feels as though you are being guided through a forest’s wild and rugged terrain. What may have been a long and tiresome journey can now be done with ease as the vocal chanting carries security and soothing qualities.

Macrocosm delivers a real spooky and lonely feeling about it. We’ve gone too big here, and while we as the listener are the same size, the landscape is now vast and empty. An interesting juxtaposition that while Microcosm felt like starting a new adventure in a brand-new world, Macrocosm now feels way too big, and I want to go home to my small comforts.

The sound on these tracks is so minimal while also sounding immense and once again playing with the Micro and Macro themes of the EP. The stresses of daily life quickly vanish as the tracks lull you into a more composed state. Standing on its own merits while serving as a companion piece to his 2025 album Reflections, Ash Sales has created an elegant new EP bursting with its own beautiful ecology.

Music to complement Ash Sales – Earthside

Gates of Siam – Temple – 2019
GORE – Peractorum – 2024
Alain Goraguer – Rare Soundtracks & Lost Tapes – 1973-84