When Care Changes Hands: Drexler’s Quiet Reckoning on “Prague”

Drexler’s music has always lived in the spaces between places, between people, between words. With “Prague”, the Australian/Hong Kong composer and multi-instrumentalist (Adrian Leung) offers his most quietly devastating work to date, a meditation on care, distance, and the moment when roles between parent and child begin to reverse.

Arriving January 16th, “Prague” is the final single ahead of Drexler’s forthcoming record Olympia-5, an intimate collection of improvised solo piano pieces woven together with ambient electronics. Where previous releases from the project have hinted at its emotional depth, “Prague” brings its core themes into sharp focus: grief, connection, and the fragile tenderness of shared time.

The piece reflects on a rare trip in 2024, when Drexler travelled to Prague with his father, the first time they had journeyed together as adults. Having lived in different countries for over fifteen years, their time together had long been fragmented. With illness already present, the trip became quietly revelatory. Drexler began noticing the small, unmistakable shifts: the things his father could no longer do, the moments where guidance turned into care. The reversal was subtle, but irreversible.

Olympia-5 itself was born from a period of prolonged uncertainty. Following his father’s relapse with lymphoma, he spent over six months in hospital care. Too exhausted for television or newspapers, his days passed largely in silence. From the UK, Drexler’s phone calls often revolved around medical updates - conversations heavy with facts but light on comfort. Music became another language altogether.

Instead of words, Drexler began sending improvised piano recordings: small offerings designed to soften the sterility of hospital rooms, to bring warmth where none existed, to say I’m thinking of you without needing to explain anything at all. Those recordings eventually grew into Olympia-5, a record shaped as much by absence as by presence.

“Prague” carries that emotional weight gently. It moves slowly, resisting resolution, allowing space for memory to settle and resurface. The piano feels suspended, as though hovering between thought and feeling, while ambient textures blur the edges, not unlike grief itself, which rarely arrives with clean lines.

The track is accompanied by a film directed by Hannah Papacek Parker, whose visual language mirrors the song’s sense of displacement and quiet searching. Moving through shimmering cityscapes and moments of stillness, the film reflects on kinship, place, and the emotional pull of returning, both geographically and relationally.

“When one does not have a solid sense of place, life is an ongoing search for kinship with other wandering souls,”Papacek Parker shares. Her collaboration with Drexler became a shared meditation on distance and belonging. Returning to the USA for the first time in sixteen years, she found herself reconnecting with long-untouched family roots - a parallel journey that deepened her understanding of Drexler’s intention to connect with his own father.

Together, sound and image create a world where Prague becomes less a location and more a symbol: a city standing in for the shifting, evolving relationship between parent and child. Walking its streets with the music playing and a camera in hand, Papacek Parker describes the process as one of co-creation, using architecture, movement, and observation as a way to process grief and uncertainty without forcing conclusions.

Drexler’s creative practice has always crossed disciplines. A UK-based composer, producer, and multi-instrumentalist from Australia/Hong Kong, he writes across music, film, television, and advertising. His work has appeared at festivals including London Film Festival, SXSW, Tribeca, CPH:Dox, and Raindance, while early singles from Olympia-5 have already received support from BBC Radio 3’s Unclassified, BBC 6 Music, KEXP, BBC Sounds, and The List.

Yet “Prague” feels distinctly personal - a moment where craft gives way to care, and composition becomes a form of presence. It doesn’t attempt to explain grief or resolve it. Instead, it sits alongside it, offering something rarer: attention, tenderness, and the quiet acknowledgement that sometimes connection is found not in answers, but in simply staying with what is.

Listen to "Prague":

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