Cosmogonia opens with creation itself, with album artwork that could be a sunburst that’s also a living organism. The first track Origin represents cosmic Genesis with almost nothing but lightning-fast clarinet arpeggios and no pauses or audible breaths for over five minutes, just a continuous fluttering torrent of notes that ripple and shimmer like a storm.

The speed is staggering, fingers flying at a rate that defies comprehension, yet there’s softness despite the velocity. Fluttering like a butterfly with relentless movement and subtle harmonic shifts, Yom will alter a single note every few repetitions totally reshaping the chordal gravity beneath. The effect is both virtuosic and deeply evocative. This is not technique for technique’s sake, and is instead profoundly emotional with a tempo that breathes, surging and receding in waves, mimicking the natural forces of the wind with a spiritual harmonic language.

The religious undertones are explicit in the tracklist, with titles Garden of Eden, The Flood, Exodus, and The Seventh Day gesturing toward the opening books of the Bible, but the music feels spiritual and mythical rather than doctrinal and dogmatic. The imagery is evocative and cinematic, yet the instrumentation remains remarkably sparse. It’s often unclear whether the ambient textures are live pads or the clarinet being further processed and reverberated, with tracks like Lost Paradise feeling loose and improvised, wandering without obvious structure. These moments offer spaces where the clarinet drifts and explores timbre in a more open-ended way, contrasting with the roughly half of the album based on lightning-fast arpeggiated patterns that gradually morph through incremental harmonic shifts.

The clarinet proves remarkably expressive under this spotlight, an instrument that rarely commands centre stage in contemporary music. Yom makes it sound vocal, bending, sighing, pleading and soaring with an undeniable virtuosity that bowls you over with technical mastery, but never feels showy because of the lingering atmosphere. Cosmogonia is breathlessly fast, yet within that speed slower currents form, and calmer patterns emerge. It’s music that’s meditative, but demands attention rather than functioning as background ambience. With minimal embellishment and a single instrument at its core, Yom creates something vast and awe-inspiring.

The titles signal a lineage of music born from a tradition steeped in spiritual inquiry, and you can feel that devotional intention in every note of Cosmogonia. Inspired by the awe at creation, the album is a creation that inspires awe. The experience is like staring at an impossibly detailed painting of the night sky, with clarity, precision, and a staggering commitment to virtuosity. Music of this level can often feel formal, academic and static, but Cosmogonia trembles with darkness and surges with enormous weight.

Impossibly fast arpeggios flutter and draw you into a trance state with an eerie sense of the unknown. Cosmogonia is a reminder of what can happen when one is totally committed to an instrument.