With Eric Schaefer, Wollny reviewed sketches, ideas, and motifs from his sound workshop, combining old with new, foreign with his own, and piece by piece, in collaboration with producer Siggi Loch, the elements came together: films, literature, painting, philosophy, aesthetics, personal experiences – for everything, there was an inevitable musical equivalent. It is no coincidence that the album opener speaks of questions. “Questions in a World of Blue,” an adaptation of Angelo Badalamenti’s Twin Peaks music, makes it clear from the outset that behind the doors this album opens lie spaces that offer no easy answers.

With a few "poisoned major chords" that hint at something uncertain, Wollny outlines the scene, while Schaefer coaxes only a few delicate, noisy brushstrokes from his drum kit, and bassist Christian Weber sharpens the edges with a smooth tone. It's a playing style unlike anything Wollny has produced before, a music of state, not development, a floating of sounds that spread through the space in wide waves. Improvisation as known from the jazz tradition, the logic of solo development, harmonic and melodic refinement, communication, the familiar negotiation within the trio – all of this is suspended here, allowing the sounds to develop layer by layer. Wollny speaks of "Neon Nocturnes," of still lifes glowing in the darkness, idiosyncratic soundscapes in which the resonance of the tones can unfold. Questions that remain open and generate new ones.

Wollny uses strange, recognizably artificial places as the starting point for each of his "Night Rides": Twin Peaks, the Bates Hotel from Psycho, the Valley of the Castles in E.A. Poe's story "Metzengerstein." The artificiality already hints at future ruptures. This complex ambiguity between seemingly simple movements is clearly a matter close to Wollny's heart, something he has discovered for himself with this album. It may have its origins in the music of Chris Beier, with whom Michael Wollny studied at the Würzburg University of Music. Beier was suffering from focal dystonia at the time, a condition that made it impossible for him to execute the movements he had practiced. Beier thus transcribed and recorded his music bar by bar, noticeably halting and fragmented, yet clear, minimalist, and incredibly intense. "The spirit of this music blew me away," says Michael Wollny. It is this spirit of powerful reduction that also permeates "Night Rides" from the first note to the last.