Listened to start to finish, through headphones and at volume on speakers, there’s not a track out of place, nor, to Tineidae’s credit, is there filler that ought to have been relegated to a remix EP.
[Release page] I should, in fairness, begin this review by stating up front that Lights, the first full-length release from Ukrainian Pavlo Storonsky (recording as Tineidae), pushes all of my IDM-head buttons at once. There are a few indelible touchpoints in my personal journey through electronic music: a surreptitious mixtape with Front 242 and New Order tracks in ’89, keeningly awkward nights (because I knew I wasn’t goth enough) at DDT in Los Angeles in ’93, Autechre’s just-released Chiastic Slide manifesting itself through my roommate’s Klipsch LaScalas, and Gridlock pulling all these threads together at the DNA Lounge. While I am not going to assert that Lights represents a new milestone by which future experiences will be measured, I will say that this Tympanik Audio release evokes each of these formative musical moments, and thus has become my go-to music for times when the outside world needs to be subsumed and my consciousness consumed by emotional electronic expressions in musical form.
“Absence,” near the album’s midpoint, perfectly encapsulates the aesthetic. Up to this point in Lights‘ all too brief 49 minute runtime we’ve heard slow-groovers like “Azure,” with its church-organ-in-a-crystal-cavern melody. “Rigel” has impeccably broken down a cyberpunk boom-bap groove into ethereal swells and a lead synth tone that at once evokes and extends Autechre’s “Cicli”—there’s even a Toytronic moment I shared with “Kasatka” and its aching long-distance melodic jumps.
But “Absence” pulls all of these elements together in a way that actually breaks new ground. It begins with a low murmur like a vast distant machine, gradually introducing chiming melody and a supportive skeleton of sparse beats. Strings swell briefly, tapering into silence—and then the main percussion riff hits you right in the face. Waves of static, filter sweeps, saw-wave ambience all mount up yet (thanks to skilled mastering) never feel murky or confused. The maximalist onslaught suddenly drops out with a minute left, and a robot-funk bass/kick groove—which was there all along, it seems—runs out the track leaving the body begging for more.
The rest of the album carries the banner forward, providing variations on a theme: each different enough to be interesting, yet never straying too far from the path laid out for it. “Monolight” briefly kicks the BPMs up into industrial-techno territory; “Sky of Glass” sounds like it could have come off the first Access to Arasaka album, had ATA recorded in an Ukrainian castle with a cupola view of the ghostly aurora borealis; and “Hollow Lullaby” closes the album ably with a tinkly-yet-ominous music box piece.
As an aside, I don’t mean to diminish the tracks I didn’t mention here (“Torchlights,” “Kasatka,” “Observatory,” and “Paper Birds”), as they are all of uniformly high-quality and provide worthy contributions to the album-qua-album. Listened to start to finish, through headphones and at volume on speakers, there’s not a track out of place, nor, to Tineidae’s credit, is there filler that ought to have been relegated to a remix EP.
Occasionally I get a sensation of hubris. For a moment or two, I feel like there is some sentience directing the Universe which has my best interests in mind and deliberately sets a beneficent chain of events in motion. Reality intrudes quickly (as it rightly should) and shatters that solipsistic illusion: I am utterly insignificant. The tiny chicken-scratches of intentionality I create on this planet—let alone the cosmos—will be obliterated so quickly it’s effectively like they were never there. This is undeniable. But still—but still!—the sensation percolates up sometimes, that perhaps there’s some greater force directing things in my favour. And the past few weeks I’ve been feeling like Tineidae’s Lights just might be one of those Universal boons pointed my way, intended to prismatically refract and amplify all of the formative musical experiences in my life into forty-nine minutes of sheer transcendence. Perhaps it will be so for you as well.
Lights is available on Tympanik Audio. [Release page | Bandcamp]
