Inal Bilsel Built A World Above the Clouds on Once Upon A Cloudtop Meadow
The Cypriot Composer’s Fourteen-Track Album Tells Its Story Without A Single Lyric
Inal Bilsel released Once Upon a Cloudtop Meadow in March 2025. Now the Turkish Cypriot composer is putting the album back in front of listeners. It runs fourteen tracks and contains almost no words. Orchestral writing sits alongside vintage electronics, toy-like timbres and close, detailed production. The whole record follows a story it never tells out loud.
You can listen to our full playlist which contains the artist’s music, and know more about the artist’s work by scrolling down the page.
How Inal Bilsel Tells A Story Across Fourteen Tracks Without Words
The world-building is the point. Inal Bilsel wrote the album as an imagined place above the clouds. Recurring characters and returning motifs do the work lyrics would normally do. A theme comes back in a different key, and you register it as the same character walking in. That is a film-score technique on a record with no film attached.
The tracklist reads like chapter headings. Once Upon a Time opens it. Meet Cloudman introduces someone. Then When I Was an Owl, Into The Forest and A Night at the Cloudtop Imaginarium move through the middle, and Until Next Time closes it the way a bedtime story closes.
Two tracks carry the same name. Lulu’s Theme and Berceuse for Lulu point at the album’s real subject. Bilsel wrote the record partly for his daughter, and he built it around childhood imagination and memory. That also explains one of the stranger production choices. He recorded an impulse response in his daughter’s room and folded it into the album’s spatial design, so parts of the record reverberate in that actual room.
Who The Album Is For, And How It Rewards A Full Sitting
The audience here is specific, and the composer says so plainly. This is for people who sit down with a whole album. Anyone who listens to Max Richter, Nils Frahm, Olafur Arnalds, Jon Hopkins, Boards of Canada, Vangelis or Ryuichi Sakamoto is standing in roughly the right place.
The production choices explain why it holds that attention. Bilsel sets small, imperfect sounds against a much larger orchestral and electronic palette. A toy-like timbre or a room recording sits in the same bar as a full string arrangement. He smooths nothing out to match.
That contrast keeps a fourteen-track instrumental record from flattening into background music. It also places the album between contemporary classical writing, soundtrack composition, electronica and something nearer experimental pop. Listeners who care how a record was made will find plenty to pick apart. That is a large part of who this is for.
The Awards And The Reviews That Followed The Release
Recognition has reached well beyond the independent press. At the 2025 InterContinental Music Awards, Bilsel took two prizes for material from this album. Sleepwalker won in the Soundtrack category. A Night at the Cloudtop Imaginarium won for Best Production. The awards listed both, and the Cypriot press reported them.
Written coverage followed the release closely. Reviewing it for Obscure Sound in March 2025, Mike Mineo picked out the opener’s gentle piano pulses and the child’s voice threaded through it. He described Meet Cloudman as something that would sit comfortably in a Miyazaki film, and noted the stately strings and rain-like effects on Into The Forest.
Pitch Perfect, Mesmerized and Sinusoidal Music reviewed it too. Further pieces ran in Spanish, Portuguese and French outlets. For an instrumental album by an independent composer working from Cyprus, that is a wide spread. It also arrived without a label campaign behind it.
Where To Follow Inal Bilsel Across Streaming And Social Platforms
That spread is the useful signal here. Instrumental music of this kind usually reaches people through Bandcamp, specialist radio, soundtrack forums and word of mouth. Playlists rarely carry it. This record travelled that route successfully.
It also rewards the way its audience actually listens: in one sitting, in order, with attention to how the pieces connect. Anyone who collects physical releases, or follows composers rather than singles, will find a complete piece of work here.
Listeners can hear the full album on Spotify, buy it on Bandcamp, and find the wider catalogue on Apple Music and SoundCloud. Bilsel posts across Instagram and Facebook, keeps video on his YouTube channel, and lists his wider work on his official site.
