Acclaimed pianist Joep Beving and Berlin-based producer and cellist Maarten Vos share their first collaborative album, vision of contentment, released via Nils Frahm"s LEITER label. It follows work together on 2019"s Henosis, Beving"s third album, which came about after the two musicians shared a bill in Amsterdam in 2018. Mixed by Frahm at LEITER studio in the German capital"s famed Funkhaus complex, where Vos also has his studio, the LP contains eight brand new compositions and is available on vinyl as well as via all digital platforms. While Maarten Vos has regularly engaged in collaborative activities, sharing credits with artists such as Julianna Barwick, Nicolas Godin (AIR) and Alex Smoke, Beving"s never recorded an entire album with another artist before. "Doing an album from scratch as a joint project was something Maarten and I wanted to try for a while now," he says. Out of their sometimes-sombre work emerged a universal eulogy to what the pianist calls "Finding comfort in the acceptance of the inevitable" but the album represents far more than this. It"s also an astonishing personal tribute to Mark Brounen, their friend and, in Beving"s case, manager, who died after fighting cancer for several years. Most of vision of contentment was written and recorded with various synths, a cello and the upright piano during July 2023, in "de Berenpan", a forest outside a small village in the Dutch province of Utrecht. Certainly, the album"s founded upon multiple ideas of serenity, whether in our world or the afterlife - and transitions are clearly a theme here. The album ranges from minimalist sounds, resigned, quiet and beautiful, to sometimes atonal, nostalgic, almost disquieting, but also brightened sounds that together reflect a life well lived, leaving for a better place - a cathartic, spiritually awakening and ultimately full of love.