Sven Wunder - Daybreak
“One can travel the world and see nothing. To achieve understanding it is necessary not to see many things, but to look hard at what you do see.” — Giorgio Morandi
Giorgio Morandi, born in Bologna in 1890, spent most of his life in the same modest apartment and became known for his still lifes. Across decades, he returned to the same bottles, vases, jugs, and boxes, arranged on tabletops and painted with painstaking attention to detail. Each piece traced subtle tonal shifts, and by the time of his death in 1964, he had built a body of work that exemplified his unique, intently observed way of seeing.
Another Natura Morta appeared in 2021, this time pressed on wax rather than painted on canvas, as Sven Wunder released his third studio album. Like Morandi, Wunder is known for building atmosphere through studied restraint. Melodic instruments fuse and layer into soundscapes that span both classical and contemporary music. That record was my introduction to his work and at the time I noted that it carried the same meditative qualities as one of Morandi’s canvases; a life closely observed, reimagined in sound.
Now Joel Darnell, the man behind the Sven Wunder project, returns with a new record, Daybreak. This time, he draws on the refined elegance of an orchestral ensemble, imbuing his arrangements with a dynamic energy inspired by the ocean. Ahead of its release, we caught up with him to discuss his singular approach to making music.
Photo Credit: Sven Wunder by Aron Pelcman
Much like Morandi, Darnell has adopted a deliberate, consistent approach to his work. “I try not to dramatise the creative process,” he tells me. “I write a song every day.” A simple mission statement but one that has proved highly effective, as evidenced by his timeless back catalogue. These fragmentary sketches are held in reserve until a larger, cohesive idea takes hold. “The general concept work of the albums and themes of my records, I do together with my friend John who also runs the label. We talk about different concepts we’d like to work with, like still life painting, and then we build a theme around that to conceptualise the record.”
In this sense, Darnell resembles a painter, standing at the easel day after day, amassing sketches that will one day become an exhibition or, in his case, an album. “My process the past couple of years has been more like a séance,” he jokes. “I go to the same coffee shop before work and sit there listening to music for half an hour or an hour, thinking about what I want to do.” These quiet moments of deep listening are what now provides the spark. “That has really helped me… then the work becomes very pleasant.”
The experiential joy of this practice animates Daybreak, a record that unfolds as a maritime journey, beginning with the first rays of light, moving through shifting moods before fading into night. Like Morandi’s still lifes, it’s a meditation on the subtle transitions that are constantly unfolding all around us.
Darnell’s path began with writing music for film and television, where his launchpad was always the piano, but recently, this has shifted. “I started every day with one hour at the piano, playing around with new ideas,” he recalls. “I did that for so many years and I felt worn out with that approach, so then I started listening more intently to music, using them as a reference or a kick off to get things started from another direction.” For Daybreak, this deep listening became foundational. “I spent a lot of time with more orchestral music, a lot of orchestral score music, like Chinatown for example, I’ve been listening to that the whole way through this and Dracula.”
Chinatown - Music by Jerry Goldsmith.
Jerry Goldsmith’s Chinatown score is moody and atmospheric, blending noir jazz, suspenseful strings, and melancholic motifs, perfectly capturing 1930s world of LA exemplified in the movie.
Dracula - Music by Wojciech Kilar
Wojciech Kilar’s Dracula score is both haunting and majestic, combining gothic choral elements, sweeping orchestration and eerie motifs to evoke the romance, terror, and dark grandeur of Bram Stoker’s creation.
It’s unsurprising, then, that Sven Wunder’s music so often evokes cinema. His back catalogue channels a golden age of composers like Piero Piccioni, Ennio Morricone, and Stelvio Cipriani, sepia-toned images unfurling in the mind’s eye as his music plays. The sounds are referential and nostalgic, yet his commitment to analogue textures grounds them in something tactile and human.
Though absent from film itself, Wunder’s work has found an unlikely home in the hyper-visual world of social media. Scroll through Instagram and you’ll hear his tracks underscoring reels and curated posts, a go-to soundtrack for a certain type of stylised aesthetic. It’s ironic that music so deeply rooted in analogue craft thrives in endlessly looping digital clips. Yet, perhaps that is the key to its success, instrumental music, by its very nature, offers a blank canvas for listeners to impose their own narratives. “The strength of instrumental music is that the experience for the listener is not guided,” Joel explains. “You can be in any mode, you can have any feeling, or you can place the music into almost any context. I think that is why it is so popular these days.”
Wunder’s tracks invite listeners to cast themselves as main characters. A slow walk through a city street, a train window at dusk, a glass of wine in a dimly lit restaurant, each moment becomes cinematic, storied, almost mythic. In turbulent times, these daydreams offer a tonic, a portal into other planes of experience, tinted with nostalgia and possibility. Wunder’s music allows us to narrate our own lives, imbuing fleeting, ephemeral scenes with unexpected weight.
Some might see this as reductive, but in hard times, creating something beautiful that people want to adorn themselves with is no small achievement. If Morandi taught us to look harder at the simplest of objects, Wunder’s music teaches us to listen more closely to the world around us. Both suggest that, when properly attuned, the ordinary can be transformed into the transcendent. As Morandi wrote, “To achieve understanding it is necessary not to see many things, but to look hard at what you do see.” Wunder’s music feels like the aural equivalent of that philosophy. By dwelling in its subtle shifts and textures, we begin to frame our own experiences in ways that reveal the splendour of these fleeting moments.
Daybreak by Sven Wunder is out Friday 26th September via Piano Piano Records.
