"Evocative ambience and electronica." - Penny Black Music
"Aarktica has long been a reliable name for those interested in the more otherworldly and transporting side of the guitar.”- Dusted Magazine
"Under the guise of Aarktica, you never know where Jon DeRosa is going to end up." - Exclaim
"Why isn’t Jon DeRosa’s work as Aarktica mentioned in the same breath as Stars of the Lid or Eluvium when discussing ambient/drone music? Ever since losing hearing in his right ear in 1999, DeRosa has succeeded in using the drifting guitar tones of Aarktica to conjure up the underwater experience that hearing music has become for him.” - Pop Matters
LISTEN TO CHRISTMAS IN PRISON: HERE
Ambient shoegaze-folk artist Aarktica has released his cover of John Prine’s “Christmas In Prison,” a wintery homage to mark the changing of the season. Aarktica’s Jon DeRosa crafts comforting sonic terrains for listeners to traverse across through his reverb-soaked guitar, melding his own unique style of glowing shoegaze-ambient with Prine's quintessential American folk songwriting. Delicate guitar tones glisten in the foreground before unleashing a wall of sound throughout the chorus, further underscored by soaring vocal harmonies with help from Mascot's Kendall Jane Meade. DeRosa's guitar is joined by a steady beat and sleigh bells provided by renowned drummer Butch Norton (of Lucinda Williams' band), whose playing fully immerses "Christmas in Prison" into the wintery soundscapes conjured through both Prine and DeRosa. For DeRosa, the magic of John Prine is not only in his masterful songwriting, but also in his ability to empathize with the characters he writes and sings about. "I can't think of another songwriter with both his level of sensitivity as well as lyrical strength."
"When I heard "Christmas in Prison" with its lilting waltz rhythm, beautiful vocal melody and lyrics that were sad, sentimental and funny all at once, I knew it was the one," says DeRosa. "The imagery Prine conjures up in the lyrics is also so vivid and poetic. Prine once said about the song, "It’s about a person being somewhere like a prison, in a situation they don’t want to be in. And wishing they were somewhere else."
On September 30th Aarktica released his tenth album We Will Find The Light via Darla Records. We Will Find the Light is Aarktica's most ambitious and sublime album to date, and marks his first collaboration with Grammy-nominated producer Lewis Pesacov. The album is available on all streaming services, as a CD digipack, and as a limited edition double vinyl gatefold, available here. This is the first physical release from Aarktica since 2009's In Sea and the first full-length since 2019's Mareación.
Beginning with the ambient guitar opus No Solace in Sleep (Silber) in 2000, the classically trained DeRosa has spent the last two decades charting his way across cosmic terrains and ambient soundscapes through patient songwriting and a curiosity in experimentation. It's a journey that began with DeRosa recording guitar experiments on a four-track cassette recorder in his college dorm after going permanently deaf in his right ear. "I was having aural hallucinations,” says DeRosa.
“Everything I knew as sonically 'normal' suddenly changed. When I started Aarktica, it was a bit like a sonic journal, trying to recreate and reinterpret sounds as I was hearing them." These recordings, which would become No Solace in Sleep, translated those classical musical forms he’d studied for years to electric guitar, stretched them into infinity, soaked them in reverb and delay, and created an entirely new sound identity that would evolve over the years.
Leading into the writing of We Will Find the Light, DeRosa hadn’t felt inspired to write music for several years. “I had been telling myself, ‘I have nothing to say,’” he says, “but after a certain amount of time, and trying everything I knew to break through, it began to feel like perhaps I was just done, nothing left in the tank.” To get to answers on whether his drive for making music was really in his heart, or because he was trying to chase some made-up idea of success, DeRosa who is a Somatic healer held a private ceremony for himself on New Years Eve and sat alone with the feelings of emotional and spiritual blockage. What began to bubble up was uncomfortable and unpleasant. Through this process DeRosa had a realization that with all the music he made in the past none of it was truly personal. He had always created characters and personas, and had only written about personal experience from an arms length. To move forward, he was going to have to approach writing from a truly authentic place. “Eventually I picked up a guitar and started playing” says DeRosa, “and that marked the beginning of how this album came to be. Something truly shifted. All the songs with the exception of the covers were written in a matter of a few months after this.”
STREAM/BUY: We Will Find The Light LP
The album, which is essentially about healing, beautifully traverses through the canyons between ambient and folk genres. With gentle acoustic plucking, haunting string arrangements, and subtle, comforting electronic atmospheres, the eleven songs that make up We Will Find the Light, showcase Aarktica’s prowess in bridging all sides of his sonic spectrum, moving seamlessly through both melancholia and optimism, setting the scene for nuanced emotions to pollinate.
“The album is about this idea that once we acknowledge certain wounds, weaknesses or unpleasant feelings, and instead of ignoring them,” say Derosa “we dive headfirst into the darkness and face everything that is terrifying, there’s at least the possibility (and more so, the likelihood) that we will come out on the other end feeling stronger and more empowered.”
Praise for We Will Find the Light
"A beautiful and dynamic ride between ambient electric symphony and intimate human song."
- Alan Sparhawk, Low.
"We Will Find the Light is a gigantic double album that feels like a rebirth." - Rosy Overdrive
“The artist holds nothing back in creating vast worlds of space and sonic exploration, but in each of those worlds is an open heart on full display. Achingly visceral and softly stirring, We Will Find the Light is the haunting and hopeful expression of a raw soul exposed.” - Atwood Magazine
“A lot of pop songs can heal heartbreak, but Aarktica goes deeper than that." - Two Story Melody
“For this new Aarktica record DeRosa explores ambient chamber pop and does a really beautiful job here.” - Daggerzine