Aukai releases new track 'Nightfall' from album Branches of Sun - premiere

Multi-instrumentalist Markus Sieber, who goes under the name Aukai, has revealed brand new music which you can hear first via The Independent.

Born near Lepzig in east Germany, he worked on this latest music in a small wooden hut near the Old Spanish Trail in Colorado, which he got to by strolling across a frozen lake.

This beautiful sense of solitude is translated to "Nightfall" - we're premiering a stunning video of Sieber performing it today - check it out below:

Q&A with Aukai

Can you tell us a bit about this track?

It’s definitely slightly different than other pieces on the album, for being the only one written on guitar for instance, instead of the Ronroco, which is the main instrument throughout the album. ‘Nightfall' journeys through a variety of emotions and thoughts, one may have during the evening hours, when the sunlight fades into the dark, which can be a moment where consciously or unconsciously a form of contemplation and reflection on our complex human nature happens.

There are hopes, there are doubts, ideas and memories, dreams and uncertainties, sometimes a sense of understanding and yet there is this indescribable something we are never able to grasp. I could see the piece as a musical analogy to one of my favourite Rilke’s poems, The Evening.

“The Sky put on a darkening blue coat, held for it by a row of ancient trees; you watch: and the lands grow distant in your sight,

one journeying to heaven, one that falls;…..” ( excerpt from translation Stephen Mitchell)

What are you listening to at the moment?

In the heartbreaking fact of the recent passing of Johann Johannson, certainly one of the most brilliant composer of these times, I am going through his incredible heritage of transcendent music again. Many pieces have accompanied me in certain moments over the last years. Fordlândia, is such a stunning record, and also his latest more quiet and minimal solo release, Orphée, with a palpable sense of space and silence which allows me to nest myself within the music and just live there for a while.

What are your plans for 2018?

One of the most significant steps and sweet challenge will be starting to perform with Aukai. When I started the project I had no intentions at all to go on tour. It was more my little musical playground to which I would invite my best musician friends to join. But more and more people have asked, and I understand, that this step might be needed in order to become somehow a real thing, also for myself.

So it’s not only a virtual something from my studio dreaming world , but it actually can walk on earth too. So far it’s much fun to prepare for a stage situation and we will hold our first Aukai ‘ pilot' concert at the National Theater of Dresden, Germany, on June 10.

Branches of Sun, the new album from Aukai, is released on 9 March via Aukai Music