“59 airplanes waiting for New York” is the debut album from Sjaak Overgaauw’s Premonition Factory. Overgaauw, who lives in Antwerp, Belgium, has been writing and performing as Premonition Factory since September 2009 and worked as keyboardist and mixer on other projects in the past. The album contains six improvised ambient pieces, mastered by Dirk Serries and is released on Overgaauw’s imaginary label Longstreet Records.

The music on this album is introspective, contemplative and occasionally dark. The palette of sounds is limited, unusually for a keyboard player, but the sound design is carried out with great taste and with stunning attention to detail. You won’t hear typical synthesizer sounds here, but this has the effect of allowing the listener to focus solely on the performances. A great deal of the music’s mesmerizing vibe draws on the fact that it is played in real-time. While some other players use multi tracking to layer different shades of sound, Overgaauw chooses to work with interactive live looping, which means sidestepping the usual linear production and mixing scenario, to give birth to the music as it manifests itself in real time.