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To listen to Berceuses et Nocturnes, the debut solo album from Swiss drummer and composer SheldonSuter, is to enter a hallucinatory night-realm animated with hypnagogic serenades and starlit reveries.Originally starting out as a jazz drummer, but more recently embarking on a boundless quest into nonidiomaticabstraction, notably with the Big Bold Back Bone quartet, Suter has again seemingly reconciled theirreconcilable, fusing genres of different eras and regions in a series of enticingly original, genre-bustingforms.Berceuses et Nocturnes derives its influence from Indonesian gamelan and Satie’s chimerical piano works,but also the Reichian-indebted minimalism of Chicagoan post-rockers Tortoise and woozy time-warpingturntablist mumble of The Caretaker, to ferment its captivating after-dark seductions. Bowed zither andcymbals fuse with the somnambulant whirr of a shruti-box to intensify the continuous ripple of gong chimeflowing like enchanted cryptography from a carillons à musique; morse code for divine messengers.Without recourse to overdubs or loop machines, Suter sustains Berceuses et Nocturnes’ rarefiedmeditations, glistening particles lingering like lullaby kisses upon the lips of the heavy-lidded, as he sows hisradiant constellations, cosmic tintinnabulations ringing through obsidian night, haunting the great halls ofsleep.