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For years, Jonas De Kesel was mostly the guy behind the guitar. Born in Ghent in 1992, he started playing guitar as a kid and spent his early years in punk and DIY bands. Eventually, his fascination with the instrument took him to Andalusia, where he apprenticed with a guitar maker, spending ten hours a day in the workshop and learning to build instruments without shortcuts.

The work was slow and exacting. Do things properly, don’t skip a step because it takes too long. Make the best thing you can with the skills you have. In some ways, it was the opposite of everything Jonas had grown up with. In another, it was completely punk: do it yourself, trust the process, and care more about the work than how quickly you can finish it.

At one point, he joined a shepherd and spent days walking through the mountains with a flock, crossing the dry Andalusian landscape at the pace of the animals. Sheep grazed, he walked, and the same movements repeated for hours. It became a rhythm, almost a trance. Flamenco also left a lasting impression. In the music, Jonas recognised something of the landscape around him: dry, rocky and raw, yet strangely beautiful.

Back in Belgium, Jonas ended up as a guitar technician for touring artists. Night drives, festivals, soundchecks and long stretches of waiting. It was during those stretches of waiting, on long tours and in the spaces between everything else, that Jonas began writing music of his own. Open, repetitive guitar music. The guitar as a mantra. Music that doesn’t seem. particularly interested in arriving somewhere. American primitive guitar meets fragments of film music and traces of flamenco, all filtered through the instincts of someone who grew up in punk and DIY culture.

His first album, Shepherd, grew directly out of his time in Spain and the experience of living alongside a shepherd.

White Horse Chestnut, his new album, carries some of that experience forward while leaving the place itself behind. It is a record about slowing down and turning inward, inspired by dreams, curiosity, consciousness and transformation. About the strange and sometimes beautiful things that begin to appear when you keep looking at something long enough.

No manifesto. No manual. Simply an invitation to step outside the usual pace for a while andto see what happens when, for once, nothing has to happen.