fraufraulein, greater honeyguide, (CS/digi, Mappa 2025)

On Greater Honeyguide, San Francisco’s fraufraulein plays a lot of instruments–guitar, synths, electronics, french horn–but the overall mood is restrained. Each of the five tracks here dwells in shadows, emerging and dissolving like vapor. There’s nothing tentative going on; it’s just that Billy Gomberg and Andy Guthrie have a keen sense of how small moves can have as much impact as loud noises. Throughout each piece, individual notes from Guthrie’s horn or Gomberg’s bass approach humbly, as if they’re not too concerned whether you’re listening. Particularly intoxicating is Guthrie’s voice, hovering somewhere between speech and whispers, suggesting that even the most human aspects of Greater Honeyguide serve a less tangible expression. -Marc Masters

<translated French -> English by google>
Four years after their last album, San Francisco ambient duo Fraufraulein presents Greater Honeyguide , a 37-minute sonic odyssey where the intimate invites the cosmos. More than an album, it’s an experience of perception—suspended, subtle, enveloping.

Released on April 3, 2025, Greater Honeyguide marks the return of the Fraufraulein duo , formed by Billy Gomberg and Andy Guthrie . True to their immersive approach, they deliver a record of deep introspection, where each sonic texture acts as a sensory key. In this work, everything seems to float: time, memories, reality itself. It is music that invites us to slow down, to feel and observe what usually escapes us. The record is part of a tradition of contemplative ambient music , but is distinguished by its ability to make the listener vibrate in unison with a universal inner world. With Greater Honeyguide , Fraufraulein do not seek to distract: they seek to make heard what, within us, whispers…

From the album’s opening seconds, Fraufraulein establishes a climate of deliberate slowness. Sounds don’t emerge: they appear. A breath, an isolated note, a distant creak—each element seems placed with meditative attention. But far from cold abstraction, this music invites presence. We can almost hear dust falling or a hesitant footstep in an empty room. Guthrie and Gomberg capture the infra-thinness of our sensory lives: the charged silences, the interstices of everyday life.

Greater Honeyguide doesn’t build a new world; it reveals the one we walk through without paying attention. Like cartographers of the subconscious, the two musicians reveal the blurred contours of our thoughts, those mental zones between two ideas, those transitions we never notice. The album acts like a magnifying glass placed on our perceptions: layers overlap, rub against each other, and fade away in a calm but never static flow. Time, here, is not linear: it spins on itself, as in a dream.

Topography of the sensitive

One of Greater Honeyguide ‘s great strengths lies in its ability to make us feel observed by the music itself. We don’t listen to it from the outside: we enter it . The pieces, with no obvious formal structure, follow the logic of a mind wandering or meditating. They accompany us without ever imposing. It’s passive listening, certainly, but alert. Like watching the rain fall or the landscape pass by from a train—doing nothing, but feeling everything.

At the end of the 37 minutes, we’re not so much changed as… shifted. Something has moved, imperceptibly . Fraufraulein’s album offers no resolution, no dramatic climax. It slips away as it appeared: gently, almost politely. But it leaves a vibrant trace, a sensory memory that we carry away without really knowing how, perhaps embedding itself in our DNA. In the silence that follows, something nevertheless remains. Perhaps this is their great achievement: making audible what usually goes unnoticed.