Style: Ambient, vaporwave, slushwave
Primary Emotions/Themes: The horror of war, lost in a deep fog, finding salvation through self reflection
Thoughts: This has to be one of the longest split albums I've ever heard in my life. Usually when you get a split it's one side of an LP per artist... not 3! This massive album is just over two hours long and spans two distinct styles.
Nmesh's portion of the album features shorter songs that are more focused on atmosphere with a strong connection to everything ethereal. Telepath's portion of the album contains longer songs that slowly progress through the phased version of reality that he brings with his music.
Nmesh's portion starts with a muted choir that fades in and out of different chords. It's beautiful. It sounds like light cascading down through an abandoned church. The choir echoes through the empty halls and the light refracts through the different and slightly broken stained glass windows. A lone female voice calls the song to an end before the album truly starts.
The real meat of Nmesh's portion is darker than the opening would suggest. These songs are slow, contain deliberate and controlled beats and shift steadily through different musical themes.
The most prevalent of these themes is samples from the movie Apocalypse Now. They are delayed a bit, but even so they are easily recognizable to anyone who has seen the movie. These samples are used to alter the tone of the music from light to dark and from dark to light depending on the direction Nmesh want's to go. Some songs start off incredibly foreboding only to transition into a sparkly city pop influenced sound. Others remain dark throughout their run time, others yet remain in a constant state of flux... an eternal gray rather than the white or black that some of the other songs decide to linger in.
The other overarching theme for Nmesh is the inclusion of far eastern instrumentation. Pan flute, Japanese guitar, and even traditional Japanese percussion are used throughout these compositions. They are used sparingly, but frequently enough that they become part of the album's identity.
Telepath offers a strongly different take on his portion of the album. There is little other way to describe this music other than slushwave. These songs are long (several are well over 20 minutes in length), they progress at a snails pace, and they have that huge wavy/phased feel to them that is only found in slushwave.
To put some perspective on this, Nmesh fills his three sides of the records with 14 songs, Telepath does the same with six. The Telepath songs feel more lethargic than anything. While that by itself sounds boring and a bit off putting the end result here is the exact opposite.
It's no secret that I have a hard time with Telepath's music, and this one was no different at first. The slow, dreary songs that sound like they are going no where for 15+ minutes just weren't my thing for the longest time. To some extent they still aren't my thing at all. But as in all things there is room for growth.
On this album in particular Telepath keeps my attention pretty much through the entirety of his three sides. The music, while slow, and yes, while dreary and sometimes boring, is equally engaging and interesting. There is a lot of subtlety in these six tracks that is easily missed if you aren't looking for it. Field recordings that are buried deep in the mix. A hidden melody underneath the mountain of slushy sounds cascading into my ears. There's depth and texture here that is hard to find in music, and that's what keeps me interested.
That said this is about as close to classic vaporwave as I'm ever going to get. Even though I do enjoy this strange escapade into the world of phased music, I can't listen to it endlessly... I do need something else to balance it out. That said these six songs did surprise me with their hidden depth and strange progression.
This album has taken me quite a few spins to truly appreciate. Even now I don't know if it's a morbid curiosity or if it's something that will continue to improve over time. As it stands though this is an album that I grew to enjoy for what it is, maybe as time continues I'll even become a real fan of telepath's music. Only time will tell.
Written February 1st 2024
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