Dying Machines is Thomas Buschbach, a multi-instrumentalist from New Orleans who started the project in 2011. Mush Records introduced him in August 2012 as a neo-classical ambient drone project with a strict no-synthesizer rule, and promised two introductory EPs for the autumn. The first, Nicht Sprechen, German for “do not speak”, came out as a download on 25 September 2012, behind a black-and-white photo of a finger held to the lips. “Await You” is the second of its five tracks, and In Your Speakers posted it five days before the release.
The method is the point. Buschbach trained on piano and guitar and studied classical arrangement, and the label described a process that uses all three. He starts from guitar parts processed until they stop sounding like guitar, writes sheet music for orchestral players, usually viola and cello, and brings musicians in to perform it before everything is mixed into the finished track. Cyclic Defrost, reviewing the EP that November, stressed the same rule: the textures come from treated guitar, viola and cello, not from synths. Mush’s own shorthand was Stars of the Lid covering Cliff Martinez’s score for Solaris.
In the label’s words, “Await You” evolves slowly from a lone piano until it ends in “a swirling galaxy of echoes”. It runs just under four minutes. The writers who covered it followed the piano. In Your Speakers described a gentle drone with a light piano melody running all the way through. Cyclic Defrost called it shoegaze meeting film score, with the keys further forward than on the opener, over bass drones and faint traces of treated violin, and counted it among the record’s most melancholic moments. Blinded by Sound picked out the “ivory-echoing” track but argued that the five pieces work best as a whole. The reviews were warm across the board, and Cyclic Defrost’s only reservation was a slight lack of variety.
The second EP, What I Have Not Forgotten, followed on Mush in May 2013. A first album, Someday Home, was announced for July 2014, but only a promo track came out, and the first full-length, You, arrived in November 2015, written and produced by Buschbach. A second, A Map of the Stars, came at the end of 2024, and new singles kept coming through 2025. “Await You” is where that piano-first, synth-free approach was first heard, three years before he had an album out.
