Derrick Stembridge

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Where Waves Begin
to Collide
by Difting in Silence

The Same Listening, Just a Different Sky:
An interview with Derrick Stempbridge aka Drifting In Silence

For more than two decades, Derrick Stembridge has quietly shaped one of ambient music's most thoughtful and emotionally resonant bodies of work under the name Drifting In Silence. What began as an exploration of atmosphere and movement gradually evolved into something deeper and more philosophical--a sound world rooted as much in presence, texture, and perception as in melody or rhythm. Across albums such as Truth, Away, Place in Time, and now Where the Waves Begin to Collide, Stembridge has continued refining a musical language that exists somewhere between stillness and motion, shadow and illumination.

In this extensive conversation with Ambient Visions, Stembridge reflects on the long arc of the Drifting In Silence project, the evolution of his idea of "post-ambient" music, and the relationship between listening, space, and emotional awareness. He speaks candidly about collaboration, rhythm, technology, visual aesthetics, and the delicate balance between his high-stakes professional life and the inward-focused world of ambient composition.

What emerges throughout this interview is the portrait of an artist deeply committed to intentionality--someone who understands ambient music not as passive background sound, but as an active field of attention and experience. Whether discussing the emotional architecture of Where the Waves Begin to Collide, the influence of loss and memory on the creative process, or the enduring importance of patience within long-form ambient work, Stembridge offers insights that feel both deeply personal and universally resonant.

For listeners who have followed Drifting In Silence over the years, this conversation provides a rare and illuminating look into the philosophy behind the music. And for those encountering the project for the first time, it offers a compelling introduction to an artist whose work continues to evolve while remaining unmistakably true to its core identity.

There's always been rhythm in this project, always been an industrial edge or an IDM influence sitting beneath the surface, and I didn't want to be filed away as pure atmospheric music. But over time, the term has come to mean something different to me. Post-ambient now feels more like a philosophical position. It means treating silence and space as active compositional elements rather than passive ones. It means a sound that asks something of the listener rather than simply surrounding them. It's not background. Its presence. Where Waves Begin to Collide is probably the most fully realized version of that idea. The music breathes, it has its own internal weather, but it doesn't push. It trusts. 

AV:  The name "Drifting In Silence" is very evocative. Does the "Silence" part of the name refer to the literal absence of sound, or more of a mental state you're trying to achieve? 

DS:  It's never been about the absence of sound, which would be a pretty self-defeating name for a musician. It's closer to a quality of attention. Silence as a kind of listening. There's a state you can reach when the noise of the day falls away, and you're fully present to what's actually around you; that's the silence I'm interested in. The music is meant to be a vehicle to that state, not a description of it. I think the best ambient music is the records I keep returning to, whether it's Brian Eno, vidnaObmana, or William Basinski; their work does the same. It clears a space in you rather than filling one. 

AV:  In your earlier work like Fallto and Lifesounds, there was a notable blend of industrial and IDM textures. How has your relationship with "rhythm" in ambient music changed over the decades? 

DS:  Fallto was me pushing hard against the ambient label. It was described at the time as shoegaze meets dancing shoes, which I still think is a reasonable description. I was fascinated by what happened when you put hard-driving, almost industrial rhythm structures inside an ambient field. The contrast created its own tension, its own drama. Lifesounds was a different kind of exploration. The rhythmic elements there were more organic, more biological in feeling, less about the machine and more about the body. Something closer to a pulse beneath the skin than a beat driving from outside.

Over time, those two instincts merged into something I find much more interesting than either alone. Rhythm stopped being a layer I placed on top of the music and started being something the music generates from within, the way a heartbeat isn't something you hear so much as something you feel. Place in Time was where I started to find that the percussion was still present but dissolving into the texture, becoming tonal rather than rhythmic. Where Waves Begin to Collide barely has anything you'd conventionally call rhythm, but it moves. There's momentum. I think of it now as the difference between a pulse and a tide. 

AV:  You founded Labile Records to house your work. How important has it been for your creative process to have full control over the "home" where your music lives? 

DS:  It's been essential, and not just in the obvious ways. Yes, full control over release timing, artwork, sequencing, all of that matters enormously. But the deeper thing is that Labile has allowed me to build a context around the music over many years. The catalog tells a story. The collaborations with w-berg, with EJRM, and with Suseti exist as part of a coherent world rather than as isolated projects. When you're working within a label structure someone else built, every decision has to be negotiated. At Labile, the only negotiation is with the music itself. That said, running a label is real work, and it has made me a sharper creative thinker because you're forced to understand why every decision matters, not just that it does. 

AV:  You have a high-stakes professional career in global PR and tech. How does that fast-paced corporate world influence the "quiet" world of your music? Is the music a reaction to it, or an extension of that strategic mindset? 

DS:  It's neither, and it's both, which I know sounds evasive, but let me explain. The professional work has genuinely made me a better communicator for artists. Understanding how stories get shaped, how context frames reception, how timing affects how something lands, that knowledge feeds directly into how I develop releases at Labile and how I think about an album's arc, not just its sound. At the same time, the music is where all of that gets set down. When I'm composing, I'm not strategizing. I'm listening. The two modes of working feel distinct in practice, even if the skills cross-pollinate. I've also been fortunate that the careers have reinforced each other rather than competed; the discipline you develop in high-stakes professional work is exactly the discipline required to finish something as interior and slow-moving as an ambient record. 

AV:  Many of your titles, False Awakening, Away, Timeless, suggest a desire to transcend the immediate. Is music-making for you an act of escapism, or a way to stay present? 

DS:  Presence, always. Escapism implies running from something, and I don't think that's what happens when I'm working. If anything, composing forces a kind of radical attention you're listening to sound at a level of granularity that normal life doesn't require; and that heightened listening is its own form of presence. The titles point toward threshold states, yes, the moment before or after, the space between waking and sleep, the feeling of time behaving differently. But I'm interested in those states because they strip away the automatic, not because they let you avoid it. False Awakening, in particular, came from thinking about those moments where you're not sure which reality you're in. That's not escape. That's an acute awareness that the world is stranger than it usually feels. 

AV:  You've collaborated with artists like w-berg (Wolfgang Worpenberg) and EJRM. What does collaboration bring out in your sound that you find difficult to tap into when working solo? 

DS:  Permission to be surprised. When you work alone long enough, you develop very strong instincts, and those instincts are valuable, but they also form walls. You learn what you won't do. Working with Wolfgang on the North Sea, for instance, his approach to dub and texture is so different from mine that I was constantly encountering choices I wouldn't have made and finding that they opened something up. The album we made together has a quality of openness, of things not being quite resolved, that I couldn't have manufactured on my own. Working with EJRM brought a completely different challenge. We're both rooted in ambient, but the collaboration pushed me toward something I'd largely avoided: brevity. Ambient music has a long tradition of the extended form, the twelve-minute slow burn, and I've lived comfortably in that tradition for years. EJRM pulled me toward shorter, more concentrated pieces, and what I discovered is that constraint is its own kind of depth. You have to say the thing without circling it. Both collaborations share the same essential quality, though: they returned me to a state of not knowing, which is where the best work tends to happen. What I lose in control, I gain in discovery. 

AV:  Your music often feels cinematic, which makes sense given your work in film and TV scoring. Do you "see" images or landscapes when you are composing, or is it purely a tactile, textural process? 

DS:  Both happen, sometimes in the same session. There are pieces where a very specific image locks in early, a quality of light, a particular kind of landscape, and the composition becomes almost an act of translation, trying to render that image in sound. But other times I'll work from pure texture for a long time without any visual correlate, and the image only arrives later, once the sound has its own logic. Beneath the Current on the new record was more of the latter. I was deep in the layering before I understood what it was describing. The cinematic quality people hear, I think, comes less from images and more from a way of thinking about time and space that film scoring teaches you. You learn to trust duration. You learn that a long moment can carry more weight than a dense one. 

AV:  How has your gear setup evolved since the mid-2000s? Are you still finding inspiration in the same tools, or has digital experimentation taken the lead? 

DS:  The tools have shifted considerably. In the early days, there was more hardware in the chain, the warmth of analog processing, those Oberheim and Waldorf textures, gear that had a physical personality you were working with rather than just through. That physicality created a certain kind of constraint that was genuinely useful for creative purposes. What's happened over time is that I've gotten better at creating that constraint deliberately in a more software-centric workflow. I'm still looking for the same qualities: warmth, depth, something that sounds alive rather than produced, but I've learned that those qualities live in decisions and processes more than in specific gear. The newest record is probably the most refined in terms of workflow, which paradoxically means it's the most stripped back. The layering is still there, it's just more intentional. 

AV:  Congratulations on the new album. The title Where the Waves Begin to Collide suggests a point of impact or transition. What specific "waves" were you thinking of during the creation of this record? 

DS:  Several are operating at different scales. The most fundamental wave is creative. This record is really about the collision between where Drifting In Silence began and where it is now. I've been making music for over two decades, and you can feel the earlier work pressing up against the current work here. Truth is in there. Fallto is in there, quieter now. The title track sits in that shadowed middle space, and then A Different Sky opens at the end, literally a different sky, a different view from where the project started. Old world into new. That arc from darkness into light, from dense to open, is the real wave the album is built around. 

AV:  The album is dedicated to the late Mike Petruna. How did his passing influence the emotional core of these compositions? 

DS:  Mike was one of my first collaborators when Labile was just getting started, a friend going back to college, and he was always the first person to hear new material. Every album, he was the bench tester, the first honest set of ears, before anything went farther. Where Waves Begin to Collide was the last album he heard, and he loved it. I'd already finished it before he passed, so the dedication wasn't about the music changing because of his absence. It was about recognizing that his presence had shaped how I'd made music for years without me ever quite naming it. The record felt like the right place to name it. That's not a sad story to me. It's a full one. 

AV:  There is a profound sense of patience in this new work. Did the writing process feel slower or more deliberate this time around? 

DS:  Yes, and not because I was trying to be deliberate. The pace came from the material. I noticed fairly early in the process that any time I moved too quickly, tried to resolve something, tried to reach a conclusion, the music would go flat. It was telling me something. So I learned to follow its lead rather than impose a timeline on it. There were long periods where a piece just existed as a low drone and a handful of harmonic fragments, and I wouldn't touch it, just lived with it for days. Slowly, the rest would emerge. That's always been part of the process, but it was more pronounced this time. Beautiful Chaos of Truth, the previous record, had its own weight, but this one required a different kind of waiting. 

AV:  The opening track, "The Moment Everything Became Clear," feels very much like an arrival. Can you talk about the significance of that track as an introduction to the album? 

DS:  I wanted the album to begin at the end of something rather than the beginning. The Moment Everything Became Clear isn't about discovery, it's about recognition, that feeling when something you've always suspected suddenly becomes undeniable. Starting there asks the listener to understand that this record is already in the middle of something, that there's a weight of experience behind it. Sonically, it opens with density and then expands, which is the structural opposite of most ambient records, which build toward fullness. Here you start in the full and gradually find the light. It felt like the most honest way in. 

AV:  In "Beneath the Current," we hear murmured, almost ghostly vocal elements. What role does the human voice play in a "Drifting In Silence" landscape? 

DS:  The voice in that track is barely a voice by the time it reaches you; it's been processed to the point where it's become texture. But I think that's precisely why it carries so much weight. There's something in the human nervous system that recognizes vocal quality at a level below conscious awareness, even when the voice is deeply altered. So Beneath the Current has this quality of human presence of someone being there without ever making an explicit statement. That's the most useful thing the voice can do in this context. When it speaks clearly, it can be too direct, too literal. When it dissolves into the sound field, it becomes something more like a feeling of not being alone. 

AV:  "Fight or Flight" introduces a dreamlike downtempo rhythm. How do you decide when a piece needs a rhythmic anchor versus when it should remain weightless? 

DS:  It's a question the track answers for you, if you're listening. Fight or Flight arrived with that rhythm already implied in the atmosphere; there was something in the base texture that wanted resolution, wanted a pulse. The title is part of the answer, too. The nervous system state that phrase describes has its own physical rhythm, an elevated heart rate, and a heightened readiness. The downtempo beat is almost a slowed-down version of that physiological response. When I'm deciding whether to add rhythm, I usually ask whether the piece is already in motion or needs to be set in motion. Weightless tracks are already traveling. Fight or Flight needed the push. 

AV:  The title track is quite shadowed and introspective. Was there a particular mental "landscape" you were inhabiting when you wrote that specific piece? 

DS:  The title track was written in what I can only describe as a state of being between things, not knowing what was coming, not fully understanding what had just passed. The waves in the title began to feel less like an external image and more like a description of cognition during grief: the way thoughts advance and recede, cover the same ground at different depths. The shadow in the piece isn't darkness exactly; it's more like the kind of light that precedes something. A sky that's still heavy but beginning to break. I sat with that piece longer than any other on the record before I felt like it had reached what it was reaching for. 

AV:  "In The Still" feels like a crucial moment of suspension on the album. How do you approach the "architecture" of a track to ensure it feels expansive rather than empty? 

DS:  The difference between expansive and empty is almost always motion, even if that motion is barely perceptible. Empty is static. Expansive is moving extremely slowly, with intention. In The Still, everything evolves at a pace that requires patience to follow. The harmonic field is shifting slightly; the depth of the reverb is breathing; the relationship between elements is changing. None of it is dramatic, but none of it is frozen either. Architecturally, I think about these pieces the way you might think about a very large room. The room itself doesn't do anything, but its acoustics shape everything that happens inside it. In The Still is built around that kind of acoustic space, vast but not void. 

AV:  The finale, "A Different Sky," has been described as "quietly infinite." When you reach the end of an album like this, do you feel a sense of closure, or does it feel like a door opening to the next project? 

DS:  Both, but not simultaneously, it shifts. When A Different Sky was finished, I felt a very complete sense of having said what the record needed to say. There was a settling. Then gradually, over days, the curiosity comes back in. You start noticing things at the edge of that last track, things that didn't find their way in, threads that want to be followed somewhere else. I think the best album closings work this way: they resolve the internal logic of the record completely, and in doing so, they free something. The infinite quality of that piece is intentional. It doesn't conclude so much as it continues past the point where the sound stops. 

AV:  How does Where the Waves Begin to Collide speak to your 2007 album Truth? Do you see them as bookends or part of a continuous conversation? 

DS:  More continuous conversation than bookends, though I understand why the comparison presents itself. Truth was the first record where I felt I'd found the actual language of this project, that quality of movement through light and shadow that the name promised. But Truth is actually part of a trilogy alongside Away and Beautiful Chaos of Truth, and understanding that changes how Where Waves Begin to Collide fits in. The trilogy traces one arc. This record is what comes after that arc completes.

The connection is right there in the sequencing if you listen closely. The Moment Everything Became Clear, the opening track, is a direct continuance from Beautiful Chaos of Truth, in the same world, same language. Then Fight or Flight arrives, and if you pay attention to what happens in the middle of that track, that's the switchover. It moves into pure ambient. That's the moment the old world hands off to the new one. Everything after that is somewhere the trilogy never went. Where Waves Begin to Collide is that same language, spoken with considerably more experience, a greater willingness to let things remain unresolved, and a clearer sense of where the project is going rather than what it's been. The same person made all of it. The same listening. Just a different sky. 

AV:  As the founder of Unknowndivide, you spend a lot of time thinking about design and culture. How does your visual aesthetic inform the packaging and "branding" of a Drifting In Silence release? 

DS:  The visual and sonic languages have to be in conversation; that's non-negotiable. The artwork and packaging for a Drifting In Silence release are never decorative. It's an extension of the same decisions that shaped the music: what to include, what to withhold, what quality of light or texture to invoke. Where Waves Begin to Collide has a visual quality that mirrors the movement in the title, something on the edge of definition, the moment just before form resolves. I tend to work with imagery that suggests rather than states, which is the same impulse that drives the music. The cultural work I do more broadly has sharpened my ability to understand how reception happens, how context shapes perception before a single note is heard. That knowledge is always operating when I'm building the world around a release. 

AV:  You've seen the ambient scene change from the "radio days" of Hearts of Space to the streaming era. What is the biggest challenge for an independent ambient artist in 2026? 

DS:  Depth versus discovery. Streaming is extraordinary for reaching people who would never have found this music otherwise. The geographic spread of the Drifting In Silence audience is genuinely global now in a way that would have been difficult to imagine in the Hearts of Space era. But the economics and the algorithmic logic of streaming platforms favor volume and frequency over the kind of considered, patient work that ambient music at its best requires. The challenge isn't making the music; that process hasn't changed fundamentally. The challenge is cultivating the conditions under which people will actually listen to the music as it needs to be heard. That requires building a relationship with an audience rather than just accumulating one. It requires communicating not just that a release exists, but why it matters and how to enter it. That's the real work in 2026. 

AV:  Many of your listeners find your music "healing" or meditative. Is that a conscious goal for you, or is the therapeutic nature of the sound just a byproduct of your own process? 

DS:  I'm cautious with the word healing because it can shade into something prescriptive, which the music actively resists. I don't make music to fix people. But I do make music to create a quality of space, and if what happens in that space feels restorative, that seems entirely right to me. The meditative quality is partly a byproduct of process, yes: when you spend a long time listening at the level of detail this music requires, a certain stillness becomes available, and some of that stillness is audible in the finished work. But it's also partly intentional in the sense that I am always asking whether the music is trustworthy, whether a listener can fully release into it without feeling manipulated or rushed. That question has a kind of care built into it. 

AV:  Having navigated 28 years of your own history, what advice would you give to a young artist just starting to "drift" into the ambient genre? 

DS:  Learn to finish things, and learn to wait. Those two pieces of advice are in tension, and holding that tension is the practice. Ambient music in particular will seduce you into thinking that because things are evolving slowly, they don't need decisions. They do. Every piece needs to arrive somewhere, even if that somewhere is very quiet. At the same time, don't mistake speed of completion for productivity. Some of the best work I've made has spent years at rest between sessions, and what I brought to it when I returned was only made possible by the waiting. The other thing I'd say is: know your influences deeply enough that you can move past them. The artists who shaped this project, Brian Eno, Biosphere, vidnaObmana, and many more, I've spent real time inside their work. Not to sound like them, but to understand the decisions they made at a level where I could make my own. 

AV:  Finally, with Where the Waves Begin to Collide out in the world, what is the next "shore" you are looking toward for Drifting In Silence? 

DS:  I'm already listening for it. "A Different Sky" isn't just a closing track to me, it's a signal. That piece represents something I feel like I'd lost somewhere along the way and finally found again: ambient music at its truest core, not decorated or complicated, just sound doing what only sound can do. Getting back to that felt like coming home.

So the next shore is really a continuation of that return. The evolution I'm hearing isn't about adding, it's about going deeper into that space, letting the music breathe at an even more fundamental level. Where Waves Begin to Collide ends in more light than it began in, and I think the next body of work begins from that light rather than working toward it. I don't want to get too specific because the work tends to resist description before it's made. What I can say is that "A Different Sky" pointed me in a direction, and I intend to follow it.

AV:  I would like to extend my sincere thanks to Derrick Stembridge for taking the time to participate in this conversation and for offering such thoughtful, open, and deeply reflective responses throughout the interview. What began as a discussion surrounding Where the Waves Begin to Collide gradually unfolded into a much larger exploration of listening, creativity, perception, collaboration, and the evolving language of ambient music itself. Derrick's willingness to speak so candidly about both the artistic and philosophical dimensions of Drifting In Silence made this a particularly rewarding exchange, and I am grateful for the care and insight he brought to every answer. Ambient Visions is honored to share this conversation with our readers and with the larger ambient community