Written by Louis Pelingen
The past 2 decades have seen a growing interest in artists using mostly instrumental motifs to archive downtime and the events that emerge in them. Strains of ambient music have touched upon these musings for quite some time now, but the emergence of certain electronic subgenres has done much more to delve deeper into this. Subgenres such as vaporwave and drone have explored musings of time, memory, and stasis of eras that have been forgotten and are clearing up the lens to find some appreciation for those stagnant, vintage stages of time.
‘That, alongside ambient music in the 2010s, has seen an emphasis on those concepts of time and decay, bringing along slowed-down samples, droning yet hypnotic melodies, and elongated track times to tell what needs to be said. It’s important to take note of these as they have been accompanied by the concept of liminal space and its own visual fragments of abandoned or even empty landscapes of places that all of us have commonly visited. It’s no wonder that the time of pure isolation brought about by COVID-19 in 2020 has elevated the concept of liminal space to the forefront, both in aesthetic and musical components.
I bring all this up due to the fascinating debut EP from Polyphonic Vision, a synth-wave project from one-half of the dream pop duo Outerhope, Micaela Benedicto, as well as the mastermind of Big Hat Gang, Mario Consunji. The project came up during the isolation in the pandemic, the outputs now come out in a spontaneous burst, where the sonic snippets are pieced together during 2020 and 2021 and ready to be released for this year.
‘Sudden Pictures’ encaptures a holistic display of the past and the future in a time where the reflection of what was done before and what may happen after is now stuck in place. It’s an auditory mood board that wobbles through retro analog synthesizers, ethereal vocal recordings, and a soundscape that slowly modulates that relaxed yet contemplative mood for the entirety of its 22-minute runtime.
It’s one whole trip to a fragmented memoir of memories, starting and ending off with instrumental murals like ‘Zoetrope’ and ‘Tides’, where the former track documents its purpose with its tapping fuzz of the percussion, the alluring echoing vocals, and the calming synth progressions, and the latter track tying things together with the layers of sweet analog synths that float amidst the stuttering percussion and cracking effects that entail the disintegration of those memories in the EP.
Then there are the other tracks that frame its musings of memory with dreamy scopes. Starting from ‘Hemispheres’ with its pictures of cities and natural sceneries as Micaela’s shimmering vocals elicit the moments fading away from what she has seen and heard from those sceneries. It’s quite the dreamy song, with all of the cascading synth chimes balanced out with the whirring low-end and tapping drum patterns creating a relaxing mood. ‘Sudden Pictures’ focuses on the memories of someone that the protagonist still keeps, like a reel of film that pops out whenever they see them somewhere else either at close or far distances.
That observation comes through with the cushions of gloss around the vocals and the background synths, accompanied by the layers of the quicker drum loops and deeper synth textures. ‘Submarine’ submerges itself into a slice of new wave, all with punchy percussive textures, blurry yet watery synth progressions, and levitating vocal melodies. Despite its watery imagery, it’s essentially an ode to the underground club scene and all the memories that we made and the people that we all meet there.
It essentially archives what we have universally felt during the pandemic, reminiscing old memories, confronting past inner demons, as well as missing a sense of self as our social hubs have puffed for a while. However, with how the EP was made during the pandemic which is reflected even further in writing, the EP manages to hit an intriguing roadblock that has to do with oddly enough, timing. It’s a roadblock that specific instrumental projects like these have stumbled upon especially when they are also inspired by the thorns brought by the pandemic.
Because as much as they have well communicated the fragments of memory through the ethereal, stabilized rhythms of the synths and vocal weariness, how it is going to age well in time and find resonance is a subjective and tangled discussion at best. Personally, it feels like a message that may possibly have been a lot more resonant if it was released during the isolation stages of the past two years. Because now that things are opening up and the lyricism focuses deeply towards reflections of memory and loneliness, it feels like a message that is sent two years late where with everything starting to open up, it personally makes the message feel less potent than it should be.
It does not mean the EP has faults whatsoever. The ethereal waves of synths and vocals are composed with enough stable rhythms and loops to anchor the shards of memory and reflection that we all went through for the past two years. However, the passage of time has its funny way of letting us know of changes that we went through and our resonance with material focused on a specific event that this EP will have to go through.
Because with 2022 opening up its walls, I wonder if this composed mood devised by the duo may work its peak of resonance during the time of isolation. Either way, the memories that the EP has captured still hold weight in a time when all of us are confronted to flip through pages of our past and contemplate through what may happen in our future, it’s just that, that resonance will be tested as time moves on.
Listen to the artist:
TFL 