REVIEW: Ishome - carpet watcher

Worth the wait? Russian producer kicks future garage for ambient murk on her belated sophomore.

62:04 // June 9th, 2025 // Trip Recordings

Call it a comeback, a timely return or a borderline shadow drop, Carpet Watcher is the second album from Russian producer Mirabella Karyanova (aka Ishome), and it deserves a little fanfare if only for the long shadow cast by her first! Her debut Confession (2013) was highlight after enduring, 'song'-sized highlight, and equally spellbinding as a production showcase. Everything about that album practically thrummed with some anxious sense of discovery: it was the sound of a forgotten angel remixed into noirish intrigue, of past-impossibles unfurling into present-suspense, of finding alien hardware at the bottom of a week-old snowdrift. It’s this uneasy sense of wonder that set Confession apart from the Burial-inspired kitsch dominating future garage at its time of release, landing it in a distinctive space closer to AL-90's eerie dancefloor hauntings, the occasional bright synthline piercing the fog. Wherever you chart it, Confession's frosty territory is just as bracing a decade on.

Carpet Watcher is another matter entirely. There's no use speculating why Karyanova reportedly finished and shelved this album all the way back in 2018, but the time gap between it and her Confession is so pronounced that it plays more as a belated reintroduction than a true follow-up. This works entirely in its favour, given how little the two have in common: gone are Confession's beats, its melodic overtones, its incremental builds — even Karyanova’s trademark icy synths have been reined in (you'll have to wait until the late-game highlight combo of "crossroads" and "downcast" before you hear anything approaching a throwback here). Carpet Watcher opens a new playbook, one consisting of glacial high-frequency drones, granular synthpads, disorienting layered echoes that flirt with glitchiness but ultimately deliver something more even-handed, and insistent vocal snippets placed at an uncomfortably focal region of the mix (something Karyanova carried over to her queasy 2019 minimal techno EP Nikolai Reptile (as Shadowax)). It's an 'ambient' record in every sense but the background one; leave this on as mood fuel, and it'll chill you from the toes up as sure as a drafty concrete floor (and for the love of God, learn from my mistake and don't even think about approaching it without headphones).

Take it on those terms, and Carpet Watcher is still an oblique experience that takes a while to open out. This is in large part a structural concern: the album's opening tracks outright decline to offer up an overarching mood, playing instead as isolated tone showcases. “zea”’s delicate drone shimmerings are too succinct to register in this tracklist (but would be right at home in a playlist of more cleansing ambient soundscapes), while the title-track's squelching acid churns like a bellyful of blue cheese and the early showstopper “felzi” places Karyanova (one presumes)’s voice in the spotlight, her spliced vocal collage a foundation for languorous harmonised crooning. There’s plenty of ground covered here, but these pieces develop too slowly and occupy frames too slim to stand as much more than aesthetic proof-of-concepts.

“dm” fares better, cutting itself out enough space and scope for its chamber-drone stylings to make a distinctive mark, but it takes until the midway “mark ii driver” for Carpet Watcher to find its feet. This track’s crime-scene synth ostinato/drone pairing introduces a much darker thread, which the following tracks grasp with relish, spinning out to successive lengths of dread (“tiras minith”), desensitisation (“tshh”) and deconstructed ghoul-techno (“downcast”). It’s here that the tracklist takes album-form, that some sense of unity or narrative emerges from its progression; for those with the appetite for such things, the queasy reverie that emerges across the album’s backend is mercurial, enticing and worthwhile (albeit less distinctive within its respective field than Confession).

This still leaves us with half an album and a fistful of shrapnel. If you buy the press release’s claim that ishome rarely releases her music, and when she does, it feels less like a project and more like a postcard from a world she’s still wandering through, it’s easy to view this fractured layout as by design, as a willful subversion of the expectations that accompany a comeback release. All power to Karyanova if so — but if that's her game now, one hopes she'll know better than to stake another twelve years of intrigue on her next dispatch. That mailbox doesn't bite.

6.5/10

Further listening:

Ryuichi Sakamoto – async

Laurel Halo – Chance of Rain

Alva Noto – Xerrox Vol.1

Paavoharju – Laulu laakson kukista

Tim Hecker – Virgins

(re. “dm”) Ulver – Svidd Neger

(re. “felzi”) Hatis Noit – Universal Quiet