New Pleasures

Description

Arp, aka Alexis Georgopoulos, makes his long-awaited return to Mexican Summer with the second chapter of his Zebra trilogy. New Pleasures advances the narrative begun with the acclaimed Zebra from 2018; pastoral in its mood, expansive in its style, the record mirrored the dawn rising over a nascent paradisiacal landscape. New Pleasures leaps forward a few centuries, placing listeners in a post-industrial urban expansion of concrete and glass, infusing the album with the glow of commerce, the smooth rhythms of industrialization, and the cold finesse of brutalist architectural style. The result is a collection of futuristic pop interiors with shiny exteriors; a prism-like investigation into the sensitive consciousness of machines, the economy of desire, and the myriad forms of possession – a dystopian response to the idyllic naturalism of Zebra. Arp sculpts the angularities into fresh and alluring shapes, expanding and contracting the form of the song to create a labyrinthine sound design. The sensation offered by the music is almost rubbery, a living and deconstructed version of high-definition pop, avant-garde music, and dance forms. Drawing inspiration from the promises of futurism, New Pleasures reflects the slippery nature of time, the multidirectionality and non-linearity of memory, how our minds shift from one millisecond to another from past to present and then to future and vice versa. In this way, New Pleasures recalls how a science fiction film can collapse multiple time periods onto one another. This cinematic influence is present throughout the album, with the songs functioning as distinct scenes of a larger narrative. Arp fuses classic drum machine technology (Linn LM-1, Sequential Circuits Drumtraks, Oberheim DMX, Vermona DRM-1, 707s, 808s, 909s) with organic percussion to create complex rhythmic patterns that defy categorization. A liquid fretless bass melds into the complex architecture of the percussion. Vintage synthesizers (Prophet 5, Fairlight CMI, DX7, Moog Model D) embellish the whole. The innovative use of call-and-response throughout the album transplants a form of song more often found in folk and religious music into a foreign electronic landscape. Meanwhile, the dance-oriented tracks bounce off harmonized synthetic drums and electro conga rolls. Shimmering electronic melodies rise, crash, and pulverize the air. Imaginative, cheeky, and energetic, New Pleasures is both Arp's most experimental and most accessible work to date.