If music is breath made visible, "Mind Over Matter" is the sound of the universe exhaling with intent.

Berlin-based saxophonist and modular alchemist Arborra has returned with an album that gently persuades you that your lungs have been underachieving. This sounds like an invitation to "breathe better", feel deeper, and possibly astral project into a cleaner dimension where cables coil like vines and saxophones glow faintly in the dusk.

Co-produced with David August, "Mind Over Matter" is not your average “spiritual-jazz-meets-electronica” fusion. It’s less “look at my modular rig” and more “listen to how air learns to pray”. That’s Arborra’s gift: turning all those blinking synth modules and tangled signal paths into something not mechanical, but elemental. The modular becomes a kind of breathing companion - sometimes sighing, sometimes fluttering, sometimes vibrating in ecstatic pulse - while Arborra’s saxophone floats above like a slightly anxious bird searching for its flock.
The twelve tracks feel like chapters in a meditative novel written by someone who went on a yoga retreat and accidentally discovered a wormhole. There are no big crescendos or beat drops. Instead, there’s pacing. Patience. An emotional architecture that builds without drawing attention to itself.

Take "Sumerian Green", a title that sounds like a new-age smoothie but plays like a forgotten ritual - part humid memory, part code left by ancient hardware gods. Or "Desert Mind", where the sax sounds like it’s drifting above an imagined landscape of cracked sand and satellite static. The track "Ritual" doesn’t so much summon spirits as it does tidy them up and offer them tea. "Catharsis" arrives like a shy revelation, and "Solitude" ends the journey not with isolation but with clarity - like a long, cleansing blink.

Arborra’s saxophone, once a traditional jazz tool, is now a kind of gentle seer. He plays not "on top" of the electronics but "with" them - sometimes echoing their flickers, sometimes resisting their loops. There’s a sensitivity to interaction here that suggests someone who’s spent a lot of time listening to both machines and the internal murmurings of their own nervous system.

What elevates "Mind Over Matter" above similar ambient-jazz hybrids is its coherence. It’s not a collection of “cool experiments,” but a singular vision - the sound of a musician not chasing complexity, but clarity. And miraculously, it’s not all serious. There's a playfulness, even in the album’s more transcendental moments. Tracks like "High Wire" seem to wink mid-air, balancing fragility and finesse like a synth on a tightrope in a headwind.

As for the overarching theme - breath - it’s everywhere, though never didactic. Arborra doesn’t lecture; he "demonstrates". His music "breathes" before you do, then waits for you to catch up. And once you do, you're somewhere else entirely. Not transcended, necessarily, but attuned.

There’s a quiet confidence in this album - a kind of soft power that doesn’t need to prove its worth with volume or virtuosity. It simply "exists", gently recalibrating your inner barometer. You don’t so much finish listening as you "emerge" from it, blinking a little slower, noticing more birds, perhaps considering a career in silence.

For fans of: Arve Henriksen, Jan Jelinek, Caterina Barbieri on a particularly calm day, and the kind of yoga that doesn't involve headstands.
Ideal setting: alone, windows open, brain in rice.
Recommended pairing: a chamomile tea that tastes like memory and the quiet conviction that your next breath might just change your life.