Imagine a cinema where the screen is turned off and the speakers alone continue to flicker. That’s where Jeff Düngfelder, under his moniker Ümlaut, invites you with Musique de Film III. His new album doesn’t show you scenes; it gives you the architecture of possible films - the corridors, the half-lit lobbies, the empty seats echoing with footsteps as the reel rewinds.

Operating out of the northern Connecticut countryside, Düngfelder has long developed a sound-world of field recordings, tape loops, electronics and quiet revelation. On this third installment in his “film music” series, he lengthens the silence between images and lets that silence breathe. The album is composed of twelve tracks each titled in a way that hints at a place, a descent, a weather change - Emigre, Frost Descent, Permafrost, Under Consideration - but always leaves the viewer-listener’s imagination doing the final framing.

What’s striking here is the way simplicity becomes radical. Gone are flamboyant gestures; what remains are textures that hover as if dizzy with potential. A kalimba ring echoes, a synth pad folds, a field recording of water somewhere deep in forest drips. The mix is quiet, careful, nearly respectful of its own space. One hears more than one catches. The effect is cinematic, yet without soundtrack clichés- you’re not being guided, you’re being led to a threshold.

There’s also a thread of concept: the idea of “perpetual geographies”, as the release notes say, meaning those unseen terrains that morph as you wander rather than stay fixed. Ümlaut has always been fascinated by the in-between: absence and image, sound and void, what lies on the screen when the projector is off. This work takes that fascination further - you don’t so much watch the music as dwell inside it.

It can be funny too, in a sly way. The innocence of a simple melody or tape loop starts to feel like a glitch in an archive, a misfiled memory of birds and machine hums. That small irony - that the album is both meditative and slightly off-kilter - gives it a warm human tremor. Because yes: this abstract architecture is built of human hands, wires, recorders, and choices.

If you are open to being still, and letting your mind drift rather than follow a beat, Musique de Film III will reward you. It’s not background music, nor is it demanding in the conventional sense - it simply asks you: “What if the story is in the space between images?” And maybe the real film is the one you project from inside your head.

In the end, Ümlaut doesn’t offer closure. He offers the lobby after the screening, the hallway, the door left gently open - and asks you to step into the unknown.