Derrick Stembridge Redefines Ambient Storytelling in 2025

Ambient music is often misunderstood as background noise, soft, drifting, and passive. But for artists like Derrick Stembridge, it’s the complete opposite: a form of emotional excavation.

For over twenty years, Stembridge has shaped a body of work that feels like slow-motion memory, each composition peeling back layers of experience until only the essential truth remains. Under his long-running project Drifting In Silence, he developed a sonic language defined by atmosphere, restraint, and a quiet intentionality that sits somewhere between presence and disappearance.

His 2025 releases marked one of the most prolific and creatively expansive years of his career. From Fading Into What Remains at the start of the year to Pathways II, Beautiful Chaos of Truth, and his collaborations under Ukniwndivide, every project deepened his exploration of emotional space and sonic architecture. But it was Home, the final full-length of the year, that crystallized everything he’s been reaching toward.

Home isn’t nostalgic. It doesn’t try to recreate a childhood room or mourn a place long gone. Instead, it moves quietly into the question: What remains when we stop trying to return to the past? Each track feels like an intimate interior walk, a memory not as a story, but as a sensation. There’s a soft ache in the resonance, a clarity in the stillness, and a sense of grounding that comes from letting the present moment speak without interference. Together, they form a meditation on belonging, not as a place, but as an internal truth. Stembridge describes the album as a reckoning with what stays with us long after life moves forward, a realization that home is carried within, not behind.

Beyond the music, 2025 was a year of expansion and refinement for him. He completed the full conceptual development of his upcoming book, The Sounds That Shape Us, a deep dive into how sound and memory intertwine. He restructured Labile Records for a more intentional future, strengthened his visual and philosophical identity across all creative mediums, and laid foundations for immersive listening experiences designed to make ambient music physically felt, not just heard.

Looking toward 2026, Stembridge is entering a new era of artistic clarity, preparing two full-length albums, curated label releases, sound installations, intimate listening-room performances, and greater transparency with listeners through long-form writing. His advice for artists reflects the ethos of his work: guard your quiet, protect the space where ideas grow, and allow your art the stillness it needs to reveal itself.

This spotlight explores the world of Home, the culmination of a year defined by depth, discipline, and the relentless pursuit of emotional truth.

Home is the album you chose to represent your 2025, a record rooted in memory, internal landscapes, and emotional quiet. What moment made you realize you were ready to make a project this introspective and unguarded?

It didn’t arrive as a dramatic breakthrough. It came slowly, almost gently, like a shift in the air you don’t notice until everything feels different.

For more than twenty years, I’ve lived inside electronic palettes, long-form textures, and the quiet architecture of ambient sound. I’ve explored vast digital landscapes, sculpted dense atmospheres, and experimented with every tool that intrigued me. But near the end of last year, I found myself reaching for the most familiar instrument I’ve ever owned: the acoustic guitar.

It was the first instrument I learned, the one that taught me how to listen. Before I knew anything about drones or signal chains or reverb tails, I knew what it felt like to sit alone with a guitar and let the room carry the sound. Coming back to it wasn’t nostalgic; it was grounding. It reminded me of the version of myself that existed long before careers, deadlines, or expectations.

The realization that I was ready for this album came from a sense of balance I’d never fully felt before the understanding that where I started and where I’ve landed had finally met in the same place. I didn’t feel any need to reinvent, or prove, or chase anything. I just felt ready to make something honest. Something simple. Something true.

Home isn’t a reinvention. It’s a reconnection, a moment where clarity, maturity, and gratitude finally aligned.

Your work has always explored resonance, decay, and silence. When creating Home, how did you approach building textures that feel like emotional environments rather than compositions?

I approached Home with the mindset of a listener rather than a composer. I wanted the album to feel like a place you enter, not a sequence of tracks you play. And to achieve that, I had to let the guitar behave like an environment rather than an instrument.

Instead of building layers on top of it, I listened to how the guitar interacted with the room. I paid attention to the air around the notes, the way the body resonated, the imperfections that revealed themselves when I played softly. I recorded the sound of the room as much as the sound of the instrument.

Those details became the emotional landscape. A finger scrape could carry more feeling than a chord. A slow bloom of resonance felt like a memory returning. A moment of silence felt like a path opening up.

When you’ve been creating ambient music for as long as I have, you learn that restraint becomes its own form of expression. The most important thing you can do is leave space for breath, for emotion, for the listener to arrive inside the work.

Home became an environment because I stepped back and trusted the sound to reveal itself. It taught me, once again, that the room is just as important as the instrument. Maybe even more.

The album avoids nostalgia and instead explores what remains after we stop clinging to the past. What did you personally have to confront or release while making this record?

The biggest release wasn’t emotional; it was artistic discipline. I had to let go of the belief that depth comes from density. After decades of layering, sculpting, and building immersive electronic spaces, it felt almost counterintuitive to create a record with so much openness.

But simplicity isn’t emptiness. It’s clear. And clarity is its own kind of courage.

I confronted my own instincts to keep adding more texture, more movement, more sound. And instead, I chose to subtract. I chose to trust the single voice of the guitar, the quiet resonance of the room, the subtle emotional shifts that happen when you let a note decay fully before moving on.

The truth is, everything I’ve learned across my entire career prepared me for this kind of restraint. The record isn’t about looking backward. It’s about acknowledging the past without being held by it. It’s what remains when you’ve lived enough life to understand that the simplest moments often hold the most weight.

I’m grateful I reached a point in my journey where I could finally make something this honest.

In 2025, you expanded Labile Records and built a unified creative identity. How has this intentional direction reshaped the way you think about your role as an ambient composer?

For many years, my work lived across different projects, sounds, collaborations, and phases. Each release had its own identity, and each chapter felt separate from the others. Expanding Labile Records in 2025 finally gave me perspective. It let me zoom out and see the arc of my creative life as a single, evolving ecosystem.

This shift showed me something important: ambient music isn’t just a genre I work in. It’s a practice. A way of listening, of connecting, of offering space.

Unifying everything under one creative identity allowed me to see how all the pieces fit: the music, the visuals, the long-form writing, the immersive spaces, even the personal philosophies behind the work. It gave my career cohesion, not because I forced it, but because I finally had the maturity to see what had been forming all along.

My role now feels less about releasing albums and more about creating emotional, sonic, and conceptual environments that people can enter and feel supported by. It’s humbling to realize you’re still discovering new layers of your craft after twenty years.

Your upcoming book, The Sounds That Shape Us, explores how music anchors memory and evolution. How did writing prose influence the way you approached sound design this year?

Writing the book was transformative because it required me to describe, in actual language, things I’ve only ever expressed through sound. The book explores the emotional physics behind music, how tone becomes memory, how rhythm shapes the body, and how sound carries our experiences long after the moment has passed.

Putting these ideas into prose forced me to slow down and articulate the why behind the work. And when I returned to the studio, that awareness completely changed my approach.

I listened differently. More openly. More carefully. The acoustic guitar became a character in the larger story I was writing, not an instrument, but a narrator. Every detail mattered: the air, the resonance, the decay, the breath between notes.

The book taught me that sound design isn’t technical, it's emotional architecture. And bringing that insight into Home created a connection between the two projects that feels intentional and natural.

Even after two decades in ambient and electronic music, this process made me feel like a student again, curious, attentive, grateful. And that’s one of the best gifts the book has given me.

You've mentioned exploring immersive listening experiences and spatial environments. What does presenting your work in physical space unlock for you as an artist?

Spatial environments unlock the physical dimension of sound, the bodily, sensory, immersive dimension. And for ambient music, that’s everything.

When music fills a room, it becomes a presence. It interacts with walls, air, movement, and distance. It becomes a space you inhabit, not a song you listen to.

For an album like Home, where so much of the emotion lives in nuance, the warmth of the guitar, the resonance of the wood, and the subtle imperfections present it in physical space elevate the entire experience. You feel the vibrations. You sense the air shifting. You notice details that headphones would never reveal.

After years of working primarily in digital environments, reconnecting sound with physical space feels like coming full circle. It brings me back to the original spirit of ambient music: creating environments that give people a sense of grounding, calm, and connection.

Presenting the work this way isn’t just an artistic choice; it's a continuation of everything I’ve learned about listening.

After more than two decades of atmospheric music, how do you protect your creative stillness and stay grounded enough for this kind of clarity?

Stillness is something I treat with intention, care, and respect. You don’t create atmospheric music for twenty years without learning the value of quiet, both externally and internally.

I protect my creative stillness by giving myself permission to slow down. I walk without headphones. I play the guitar without recording. I listen to the world as it is, without trying to manipulate it. These practices keep me grounded and remind me why I make music in the first place.

Over the years, I’ve learned that creativity isn’t sustained by pressure, it's sustained by presence. It’s nurtured through patience, listening, curiosity, and gratitude. I’m thankful for the long journey that taught me this. It took many years of experimenting, refining, stumbling, and evolving to understand that silence isn’t the absence of sound  it’s the foundation of all sound.

That understanding is what keeps my work honest.It’s what keeps me grounded.And it’s why I still feel inspired after all these years.