Style: Ambient
Primary Emotions/Themes: Slow, morose music that reminds me of my shortcomings
Thoughts: Crate digging is one of my favorite things about record collecting/listening. You go through some old dusty bins that have been sitting around for ages and something catches your eye. The price is right, but you have no way of seeing if the music is good or not... do you take the risk and bring it home? That was exactly the situation I found myself in with Jasper TX's An Index of Failure.
Needless to say I bought the record, and when I put it on my turntable I was graced with an ambient score that took me on an uncomfortable trip down memory lane. You see, the title of the record isn't just for show, it tapped into my unease about my past actions and it dragged those deep and often long forgotten memories back to the surface. The ones that make me cringe, the ones that make me well up with regret, the ones that make me cry.
Jasper's music is based around slow looping melodies... not too unlike a certain Brian Eno on his first forays into ambient music. These melodies are minimalist... so much so that I struggle to call them proper melodies. A single chord repeated over the coarse of 11 minutes (Rivers Flow), slowly cascading against my ears to the point where I'm overwhelmed by the past and all I want to do is curl up in bed and forget about the world.
I don't know how often I can listen to this record, it takes my mind to dark places. That said, I will never get rid of this thing... it's too powerful and too moving. The way that it stirs up emotions in me like no other record in my collection can makes it worth keeping. Even if it only hits the turntable once every other year.
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