Midway through Life Above, the new album by Swedish composer Patrik Berg Almkvisth, the sound leaps forward and juts outward, like some high alpine peak springing eternally toward the sky. The preceding 20-or-so minutes, much like the ones that follow, are contemplative and beautiful, worried and pensive. But this is “Mountain Goats,” Almkvisth’s musical transcription of a real-life moment of wonder he experienced during a three-week trek through Nepal to the base camp of Mount Everest in the spring of 2023.

That trip was occasionally disconcerting for Almkvisth, but the sight of the wild animals dashing among high Himalayan places was an instance of unguarded joy. Working with his friend, the composer Martin Rott, Almkvisth turned the encounter into a mid-album eruption, its gentle waltz rhythms and refracted piano melodies suddenly reaching what might best be termed an orchestral drop. It is the feeling of the sun finally breaking through clouds, of doubts about the future instantly giving way to the splendor of the present.

In late March 2023, Almkvisth, who also records under the name LUCHS, flew to Nepal with grand visions and ambitions. He took along his Zoom recorder, hoping to capture what he assumed were the variegated sounds of those mountains for his own future music. He also hoped the grandeur of the vistas would inspire new melodies and compositions, bits he could tuck away in his journal or phone for subsequent use. But by and large, Almkvisth captured mostly wind in the wild, nature buffeting his attempts to document the sonics of the place. Glaciers he expected to wow him had mostly been reduced to rock outflows, literal cascades of visible climate change. And despite years of efforts by locals to rid the area of refuse left by expeditions, the amount of damage done by other visitors was deflating. And so, he responded not to his preconceptions of his journey and the region but to his reality there. Life Above is his stirring 15-track orchestral and electronic travelogue, reflecting the people and places of Nepal and the questions about our existence that it all raised for him. Namely, how can the Earth still be so giving when we’ve taken so much already?

Almkvisth is the first to admit he is not some extreme alpinist or adventurer. He is, instead, a lifelong artist, having grown up in a family deeply invested in music and theater; his first memory is curling up in a ball beneath his grandfather’s feet as he played the piano at church, an aesthetic that still informs the music he now makes, as if gazing upon spiritual aspirations through a secular scrim. His work now spans multiple disciplines, as he’s an accomplished actor on stage and film and a composer whose pieces, shuttling between grandeur and intimacy, have found international audiences online. In 2024, he combined these parallel pursuits through Solskur, his award-winning 28-minute music video to accompany his 2020 debut of the same name.

But a few years ago, he accompanied his brother-in-law on an ascent of Kebnekaise, Sweden’s highest peak, wedged against its northern border. The experience stunned him on every level. Yes, it was physically challenging, but it was existentially invigorating, too, the way being so high on something so massive made him feel infinite and infinitesimal at once. The silence was stunning, as was nature’s neutrality—it simply was as it had been and, for the most part, would continue to be. He wanted more of those feelings.

He booked a trip, then, to the home of the world’s tallest and most coveted mountains, joining eight strangers on a guided trip from Kathmandu to the base camp of Mount Everest and back. Though the famed hub of expeditions was the centerpiece of the quest, Almkvisth was there only part of a day. Instead, it was the journey that was the most revelatory, from attending the funeral of a stranger (“You cannot hide death,” a local assured him when he worried he was an interloper) to summiting Kala Patthar, with its commanding views of Everest’s summits, cols, and shoulders. He met Nepal natives and ate their food, marveled at wandering yaks, and journeyed to several high monasteries. At one point during his trip, he finally heard Hollie Kenniff’s moving remix of Solskur, his devotional to his late mother. One companion had to be evacuated by helicopter during a medical emergency. He kept a diary of everything, punctuating his ridgeline illustrations with pictographs of flowers and strings of observations.

Life Above feels like his impressionistic musical diary of all these experiences, however grim or wondrous they were. He is spellbound during “Welcome to Kathmandu,” a two-part prologue where field recordings of bustling streets give way to contemplation and reverence as he attends that funeral. It is solemn but appreciative, a piano-bound token of thanks. The brief and exquisite “Namche Sunrise” begins as a drone, moving as steadily as some predawn wind. But the melody that soon emerges is as memorable as that which begins Music for Airports; it is the sound of smiling out upon a new day, the sun cresting the ridges that frame a Nepalese village. He sprinkles the voices, bells, and birds of Tengboche Monastery across a lush seven-minute hum called “Dawa Choling Gompa.” Its steady undulation is like a hymn for the devotion of the Tibetan Buddhist monk there, for their commitment to ideals in a time where such steadfastness seems in ever-shortening supply.

The record reaches its dark crescendo during “Khumbu,” as Almkvisth stares out at the iconic glacier of the same name—a key antagonist of almost every account of climbing Everest ever—and mourns the way it is receding ground and becoming rubble. Bits of rage flash as concert snares and cymbals crash beneath roaring strings. But that is not, of course, where it ends. Just before his troupe turned around and raced down from the Himalayan highlands, Almkvisth sat silently with his guide and watched the sun rise over Everest. It reflects the beauty and glory not only of a new day but also the constancy of nature in spite of our attempts to wrangle and mangle it. As long as the sun still looks that magnificent cresting above a peak so grand, maybe hope exists for all of us.

Art and travel share a sense of discovery. They show us new ways of seeing the world, undercutting our preconceptions so we have a better understanding of what has actually happened and may still. It is easy to romanticize the heavens of this Earth, the Himalayas, the way they bedevil even the strongest of us. It is easy to denigrate them, too, as the playground and wasteland of the rich. But when Almkvisth went, he let his mind be changed, to find that the truth he felt was somewhere at both extremes, and so, in the middle—an admixture of awe, sadness, worry, and wonder so strong that it inspired his musical interpretation of the place and the most imaginative work of his career, Life Above. It is his postcard dispatched to everyone else, sweet and sad and stunning.

Recommended For Fans Of: Evgeny Grinko, John Hopkins, Olafur Arnalds, Nils Frahm