Oz Fritz – All Around the World: A Sonic Journey Between Sacred Space and Stillness

Album Review

Artist: Oz Fritz

Album: All Around the World

Label: Sub Rosa

Release Date: August 24, 2004

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Oz Fritz’s All Around the World isn’t an album in the usual sense—it’s a vessel. A mapless journey. A carefully woven audio experience that invites the listener to slow down, breathe deeply, and dissolve the boundaries between place, presence, and perception. You don’t simply listen to this record—you move through it, or more accurately, it moves through you.

is highly regarded and renowned in the music industry. He's a sought-after Grammy Award winning producer and mix and mastering engineer

Oz Fritz is a sought-after Grammy Award winning producer and mix and mastering engineer. He is best known for his work as an audio engineer with Tom Waits or Bill Laswell (to name but a few), whose projects have taken him to the edges of the world—both literally and sonically. During those travels, Fritz did something quiet but profound: he listened. He recorded the spaces between the performances—the echoes of temples, the footfalls in sacred sites, the chants of monks, the reverberations of prayers. In his downtime, he was documenting what others were passing by. The result is All Around the World, a collage of field recordings layered with intention, unaltered by additional instrumentation, but arranged into something intimate and mysterious.

The first thing to understand about this album is that it doesn’t unfold in traditional musical terms. There are no verses, no choruses, no hooks to hum along to. Instead, there are moments: the bell of Sacré-Cœur mixing with the murmur of Egyptian streets, the distant thunder of temple drums colliding with the stillness of a midnight mass. At times, you feel like you're sitting cross-legged inside the King’s Chamber of the Great Pyramid of Giza; at others, you’re on a train platform in Paris, half-listening to the rhythm of announcements and city breath. Fritz isn’t just capturing sound—he’s sculpting it into atmosphere.