For over two decades, Jon DeRosa has been quietly reshaping the borders between ambient, shoegaze, and art rock. As Aarktica, he’s built a catalog that feels both intimate and cosmic — the kind of music that drifts through time and memory rather than through genres. His tenth studio album, ‘Ecstatic Lightsongs,’ released on HanaqPacha Records, is a return to the light after years of exploring the edges of silence. It merges transcendent atmospheres with darkly danceable rhythms, expansive analog synths, and layers of tape-echo guitars — a lush soundscape that feels like nostalgia illuminated from within.
DeRosa calls the record “a sonic love letter” to his earliest influences, a phrase that captures its warmth and clarity. From the opening moments of “Trick of the Light,” the album shimmers with a sense of longing. His voice, a deep baritone that cuts through the haze, feels newly present after years spent behind walls of texture and reverb. Across its nine tracks, he reintroduces rhythm, melody, and pulse into his work without losing the ambient melancholy that defines Aarktica’s sound. It’s both a homecoming and a reawakening.
“Aarktica has always been this thing for me that’s a little compartmentalized,” DeRosa says. “I write a different kind of music than what I really listen to on a daily basis. I don’t know why that is, other than it’s what kind of flows naturally from me, and also that I have a wide range of musical interests.” He pauses, reflecting on how Ecstatic Lightsongs bridges that gap. “With this album, I wrote the record I would’ve loved to listen to as a teenager, really. Driving around dark shore roads in New Jersey, meeting with all the Lost Boy friends at all-night diners or the Point Pleasant Boardwalk. The soundtracks to those rides were Bauhaus, Skinny Puppy, Echo & The Bunnymen, Nick Cave, Depeche Mode… and then in later years, the more artful sounds of Talk Talk, Durutti Column, etc.”
Those influences aren’t just sonic reference points — they’re emotional anchors. “These are still the bands that mean the most to me,” he says. “They tap into a very special time and place. I wanted to recapture that youthful spirit with this album, and channeling them helped me get there.”
The sense of youth and rediscovery pulses through Ecstatic Lightsongs like an undercurrent. The album’s production — led by four-time Grammy nominee Lewis Pesacov, with contributions from Mike Pride, Charles Newman, and cellist Henrik Meierkord — creates a landscape that’s at once vast and tactile. It feels alive in ways Aarktica’s recent work deliberately resisted. After years of drifting through ambient and drone terrains, DeRosa wanted to reintroduce a sense of movement. “I found myself wanting to hear an album that had that type of movement but also ambience, and one that was not electronic in nature,” he explains.
He looked to Laughing Stock, Talk Talk’s 1991 masterpiece, as a kind of spiritual blueprint. “I thought a lot about the way rhythm is used on albums like Talk Talk’s Laughing Stock, where the drums hold a beautiful space that allows the musical elements to unfold freely, spaciously, and minimally at times,” he says. “This blueprint afforded me an opportunity I’ve never really had before to explore melody and ambience in new ways.”
The creative freedom gave DeRosa space to bring his voice back into focus. Ecstatic Lightsongs marks his most vocal Aarktica release in years, with his baritone carrying seven of the nine tracks. “The last record, Paeans, was instrumental,” he says. “This one needed a human voice, and I was ready to return to that. The lyrics explore nostalgia, loss, alienation, and the desire for human and spiritual connection, but with optimism and hopefulness that leaves the door ajar for the light to get in.”
Optimism often arrives in moments of fragile observation. DeRosa has a gift for turning small details into portals of emotion. “Many of these songs focus on the smallest elements of memory,” he says. “How we remember the moonlight looking on someone’s face. A passing conversation about cloud formations over coffee. I’m fascinated at how some seemingly trivial experiences stay with us forever and become significant pieces in our story.” He resists the idea of songwriting as preservation. “I don’t know if it’s an active act of ‘capturing’ anything,” he says. “If anything, it’s the opposite — just letting things ‘be’ without attempting to impose some deep meaning that fits your narrative in the present. Most memories absolutely dissolve into abstraction, and that’s beautiful too.”
Throughout Ecstatic Lightsongs, DeRosa is joined by singer Britt Warner, whose ethereal harmonies offer a celestial counterpoint to his earthbound tone. Her presence softens the record’s edges, transforming songs like “Cloud Formations” and “Destination Paradise” into dialogues rather than monologues. “I’ve known Britt and her music for years,” DeRosa says. “It was always in the back of my mind that we’d collaborate.” On “Destination Paradise,” Warner takes the lead, her voice hovering over orchestral strings and a downtempo beat as she and DeRosa explore themes of faith and transcendence.
The song’s concept came from an unlikely place: the “cargo cults” of Papua New Guinea — a metaphor for spiritual yearning in a material age. “I’ve always had a bit of a fascination with this subject since seeing it featured in Mondo Cane, the infamous 1962 Italian documentary by Gualtiero Jacopetti,” DeRosa explains. “In that segment, an airport had been built in Port Moresby, near rainforests where many primitive and uncontacted peoples lived. These tribes began building their own primitive landing strips and control towers, as they believed the planes they observed flying overhead were sent by their ancestors, filled with riches, and that they were being hijacked by the white man. Their hopes were that their ancestors would land on their air strips with the wealth from the afterlife, or to take them with them to the beyond.”
He pauses, the image lingering. “I found it to be kind of devastating, but also kind of hopeful and beautiful in a way,” he says. “The knee-jerk reaction may be to think that they’re absurd or primitive. But when you consider the beliefs that most religions espouse, and what most otherwise rational people believe who belong to some faith, it’s really not that different or outlandish.” For DeRosa, music has always been a form of spiritual exploration — a way of making sense of what lies between loss and revelation. “Music is one of the oldest forms of communication and expression,” he says. “How we consume or create it can certainly be on a spiritual level, either consciously or unconsciously.”
Spirituality, for DeRosa, is intertwined with his own physical experience of sound. Early in his career, he lost hearing in one ear — a loss that both defined and deepened his relationship with music. “On a technical level, I’m more comfortable working with a producer or mix engineer because I know the way I’m hearing a mix is different than how everyone else is hearing it,” he says. “On a personal level, every album I make is another triumph, because there was a time when my hearing loss devastated me on a mental health level. I’ve been partially deaf now for much longer than I actually had regular hearing, so I’d say I’ve adapted as well as I could. I do think it would be very interesting if modern medicine reaches the point of repairing my hearing before the end of my life. I would love to experience the world around me, hear certain albums (and most certainly some of my own) with full hearing restored.”
The awareness of fragility — of hearing, of memory, of time itself — permeates everything DeRosa creates. It’s why ‘Ecstatic Lightsongs’ feels so alive, so deliberate. He’s not just making music; he’s chasing echoes, building new memories out of old frequencies. He recalls the early years of Aarktica with clarity, when the project’s debut, No Solace in Sleep, placed him among the late-’90s wave of experimental ambient artists. “In the early days, after Aarktica released No Solace in Sleep, I had to make a decision as to if I were going to continue on that same path — which was very ambient/drone, a path that many of my peers traveled down, some to great success — or if I was going to honor my own creative impulses and take chances by exploring the other ideas I had in my head. After 25 years, it’s clear I went with the latter.”
Independence came with tension. “I did feel a pressure or at least a conflict in those early years, because I believed I would’ve had greater success building on the same themes I had begun with NSIS instead of departing from it. It would’ve made me more of a ‘genre artist,’ with more ‘reliable’ output. But in the end that wasn’t fulfilling, because my interests, my musical tastes are diverse, and I wanted to continue in a way that was more purely authentic to me without being tied to this abstract idea of what Aarktica ‘should be.’”
Authenticity has always been the through-line, even when the music itself shapeshifts. “Aarktica has never really enjoyed the level of success that has made me indebted to anyone or feel the need to explain or justify what I make,” he says. “I make the music I want to make in as authentic a voice as possible and I love when it connects with listeners in a meaningful way. I never intended this to be a vanity project, but I also don’t pander.”
‘Ecstatic Lightsongs’ closes with a cover of The Chameleons’ “Second Skin,” rendered with orchestral weight and cinematic sweep. For DeRosa, it’s more than homage — it’s a time capsule. “The whole album revolves around nostalgia and memory,” he says. “There was no better song than this one I had kicking around in my head since I first heard it as a 15-year-old goth. Once again, one of those memories that inexplicably sticks around over the years.”
If ‘Ecstatic Lightsongs’ is, as DeRosa calls it, a love letter to his past, it’s also a message in a bottle to the young musician he once was — the one recording lo-fi experiments on a four-track cassette after losing hearing in one ear, learning to reimagine sound as vibration and color. Asked what that younger self might hear in this album, DeRosa smiles. “Maybe he’d just recognize the joy,” he says. “That even after everything, the light still gets in.”
Featured Image: Artist Supplied
