Rolf Gisler has always sounded like the sort of person who stares at ordinary objects until they confess their secret life. A shower door? A portal. A manhole? A resonant cathedral. A train station? A temporary cosmos made of suitcase wheels and the sighs of commuters. UnKnown, his second album as DarkSonicTales, feels like the diary of someone who discovered that nothing is truly mundane unless you refuse to listen.

If his debut hinted at this tendency, the new record doubles down, salts the ground, and then plants something stranger. The five pieces don’t form a suite so much as a drifting archipelago: islands of drone, eruptions of post-rock, mechanical murmurs, sudden idylls. It’s the kind of record where an alphorn can coexist peacefully with a kalimba without anyone needing to call the cultural police. And somehow it works - not in a smug look-how-eclectic-I-am way, but with the natural ease of someone who trusts curiosity more than genre boundaries.

“Ellipsis (Origin)” opens like a ceremony held on a mountaintop at dawn, while “UnKnown” - the album’s lung and heart - stretches for nearly fifteen minutes, built from the percussive patter of shower water on glass. It shouldn’t make sense. It does. The piece expands slowly, like a thought that refuses to resolve, unfurling drones that glow with a strange warmth, as though the plumbing of the universe were humming to itself.

Elsewhere, “SomeCallItRunning” introduces the piano of Iwan Gasser, which cuts clean through the texture like a solitary runner passing a row of shuttered houses. “TrainStation” is exactly what it promises: a collage of rails, footsteps, and the particular loneliness of public spaces where nobody is meant to linger. It’s post-rock for people who prefer trains to guitars. And then there’s “Drain”, the manhole elegy - an ode to subterranean resonance, to what cities murmur when they think no one is listening.

What keeps the album compelling isn’t its novelty for novelty’s sake, but its sense of play. Gisler treats sound like clay, squeezing and stretching it until an unexpected face emerges. He’s not chasing transcendence; he’s chasing possibility. The album becomes an argument - gentle but firm - that getting lost is not a failure but an art form, the sort of thing children are naturally good at and adults must relearn before they calcify into routine.

There’s something quietly funny, too, in this devotion to the “beauty of not knowing”. In an era so obsessed with certainty it practically dreams in bullet points, Gisler proposes a different kind of intelligence: stumbling around in wonder instead of running toward conclusions with a stopwatch.

Listening to UnKnown feels like putting on a coat you haven’t worn in years and finding a note in the pocket - written by you, but from a time you barely remember. Not a revelation, not a prophecy. Just a reminder: there is still room for mystery, even in the squeak of wet asphalt.

By the needle’s last rotation, the unknown hasn’t been solved - of course not. But it has been inhabited, breathed in, rearranged into something oddly welcoming. A map drawn in smudges, annotated by rainfall. A sonic reminder that if you surrender to the detour, the destination might finally stop mattering.