Eyes Like Torches at the Gate by Ratyński is a two-track classical guitar EP that gently crawls out of the abyss of modern noise and politely asks if you’d like to cry about the nature of change for approximately seven minutes. And somehow, by the end of it, you will have done exactly that, without a single lyric uttered. This is not music designed to chase streaming numbers or get slapped over travel vlogs; it’s music for people who’ve stared out of train windows too long and started narrating their life like it’s a BBC drama.
The first track kicks off with what is technically a tango, but in that “we’re going on a journey, emotionally and also metrically” kind of way. It starts with a bounce in its step. There’s momentum, movement, the illusion of stability. And then it begins to glitch in a way, any by that I mean in the most elegant way possible. Bars twist; accents slide out of frame like a rug pulled gently from under your expectations. But amid all this rhythmic mischief, there’s still a melody holding your hand; one that repeats, reshapes, and persists like the memory of a home you left behind. You don’t hum it because it’s catchy; you hum it because your soul went “oh, that one” the moment it showed up.
Then comes the second track, which says, “Okay, now that we’ve moved through space, let’s move through time.” Built on a theme-and-variations structure, it opens with something that sounds like a lost Celtic hymn sung by wind. And then it mutates gracefully, sometimes bizarrely through jazz, early music, and what might generously be described as post-rock if post-rock were polite enough to remove its shoes. Each variation feels like visiting a different version of yourself in a parallel timeline. And no matter how strange things get, the emotional gravity of the original theme remains, pulling everything back to center like some kind of musical North Star.
But what really elevates Eyes Like Torches at the Gate is its refusal to be clever for the sake of it. This isn’t a show of technical virtuosity (though it absolutely is that); it’s not trying to win “most artistic” in some conservative panel of Serious Music People. It’s music with purpose; about the soft violence of departure, the weird hope that arrives with becoming unmoored, and the quiet suspicion that the destination we’re chasing is not a place, but maybe a version of ourselves we forgot how to be. It’s about leaving home, or losing it; about endings that feel like starting over; about torches in the dark that turn out to be other people holding mirrors.
So if you’ve got a couple minutes, a decent pair of headphones, and at least one unresolved emotional wound from your twenties, give Eyes Like Torches at the Gate by Ratyński a spin. It won’t fix you. But it might remind you that some kinds of sadness are actually just memories disguised as progress. And that sometimes, the best travel stories are told without a single word.
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About the Author
A tenured media critic known working as a ghost writer, freelance critic for publications in the US and former lead writer of Atop The Treehouse. Reviews music, film and TV shows for media aggregators.
