The Seven Fields Of Aphelion
Periphery
Graveface; 2010
I typically prefer my music to be a bit poppier, a lot punchier, and to not be powered almost purely by ethereal keyboard exploration, so I was a bit surprised at how much I enjoyed Saturdays=Youth, the stellar 2008 record released by French pop artist M83. There was obviously something to those lush arrangements and that melancholy guy-vs-girl vocal delivery that resonated so deeply within me. Maybe I needed to fall in love with a record that asked me to sit down and allow the waves upon waves of sound to wash over me, providing some sort of catharsis to a soul that typically digs on various forms of harder-edged rock and folk music. In the end, it wasn’t the shoegazing wall of guitar feedback that calmed me, but the dense, yet delicate synthesizer flourishes that kept my attention and caused me to probe more deeply into that band’s aesthetic.
So, when I began to dive into Periphery, the debut solo record from The Seven Fields Of Aphelion, I was pleased to find many of those same sonic shapes and tones at play, but in a more avant-garde fashion. This twelve-song project calls to mind the lightest, airiest material from M83, Sigur Ros, and (yes) Air, but it does so in a way that stretches how I typically define pop music. The music is predominantly comprised of the slow, bubbling background coos, swells, and oohs that lie beneath and provide texture to most synth-pop from the ‘00s (as in, on the relative “periphery” of what makes up such songs). The twist here is that I’m enchanted by how the artist, who happens to be a member of Black Moth Super Rainbow, has assembled a fine display of minimalist, yet gorgeous post-pop/rock that often feels bereft of tempo.
Each song floats upon a sea of luxuriant, slow moving arpeggios being sent through a heavy delay cycle. I can imagine that these tracks could be bent and warped to serve as the downtempo section of any after-hours DJ set, but to do so would lose so much of the beauty present in these artfully constructed new-school sonatas. Undoubtedly, there was copious twisting of LFO knobs and such in order to build the loops and loops of effects inherent to neo-classical synth-pop of this nature, but it is done with a fine composer’s touch.
Admittedly, it will require a wealth of patience to discover all of the aural jewels that reside within Periphery. It’s actually a rather difficult album to engage on its surface, especially with tepid cuts like “Cloud Forest (The Little Owl),” “Fever Sleep,” and “Sunburst Chemicals” with which to contend. In fact, I’m sure that plenty of folks will just hear a gaggle of random snippets from some advanced level piano student’s book layered upon each other somewhat haphazardly. But if you dig deeply into selections like “Grown,” “Mountain Mary,” and “Michigan Icarus,” there is a rich bed of content ready to be explored. If anything else, The Seven Fields Of Aphelion has crafted a beautiful, haunting album that can be used as the background music to a chill hipster’s (or this cranky critic’s) meditation time.