Photon Wave Orchestra - Echoes Across the Astral Wastelands EP

Photon Wave Orchestra
Echoes Across the Astral Wastelands EP
[Photon Wave Orchestra; 2010]
10.0








I had never even seen a shooting star before. 25 years of rotations, passes through comets' paths, and travel, and to my memory I had never witnessed burning debris scratch across the night sky. Photon Wave Orchestra were hunched over their instruments. Fred Zoidos slowly plays on his masterfully-crafted stradivarius whilst his younger sister, Robyn “Robbie” Smith sings, eyes closed, into her microphone like she was trying to kiss around a big nose. White pearls of arena light swam over their faces. A lazy disco light spilled artificial constellations inside the aluminum cove of the makeshift stage. The metal skeleton of the stage ate one end of Florence's Piazza Santa Croce, on the steps of the Santa Croce Cathedral. Michelangelo's bones and cobblestone laid beneath. I stared entranced, soaking in Photon Wave Orchestra’s first release, chiseling each sound into the best functioning parts of my brain which would be the only sound system for the material for months. Sometimes an album is so good and makes its case so flawlessly that it spawns a mini-genre of its own and becomes shorthand for a prescribed set of values. The Velvet Underground's third and Miles Davis' Bitches Brew are two older records that spring to mind, and I'd toss in Spiderland as well. It's not a long list, but somewhere on it belongs Photon Wave Orchestra's Echoes Across the Astral Wastelands.

35 minutes of lush soundscapes entangle your senses, but not in a tight constriction, but a gentle caress, similar to that of a mother gently rocking her baby back and fourth, singing soft lullabies to calm the upset child until they fall into a state of slumber. An aural nirvana is opened up through seemingly simple drones. However, to output such sounds requires superhuman musicianship. The pitch-holding is unreal and far exceeds that by any person on earth, living or dead. It is an emotional, psychological experience. Echoes Across the Astral Wastelands sounds like a clouded brain trying to recall an alien abduction. It's the sound of a band, and its leader, losing faith in themselves, destroying themselves, and subsequently rebuilding a perfect entity. In other words, Fred and Robyn hated being Falling Rose and Dead Entry, and ended up with the most ideal, natural recording yet in the history of humanity. The track's final moments are a wash of humming synths, echoing moans, and pins-and-needles noise that comes just a little too close to human screaming. By the time the piece ends, the tide is way out.

Echoes Across the Astral Wastelands  still wields an uncanny, affirming power. It's the kind of music that makes you believe there is a Heaven, and that this is what it must sound like. The experience and emotions tied to listening to this extended play are like witnessing the stillborn birth of a child while simultaneously having the opportunity to see her play in the afterlife on Imax. It's an album of sparking paradox. It's cacophonous yet tranquil, experimental yet familiar, foreign yet womb-like, spacious yet visceral, textured yet vaporous, awakening yet dreamlike, infinite yet 35 minutes. It will cleanse your brain of those little crustaceans of worries and inferior albums clinging inside the fold of your gray matter. The harrowing sounds hit from unseen angles and emanate with inhuman genesis. When the headphones peel off, and it occurs that two people created this, it's clear that Photon Wave Orchestra must be the greatest band alive, if not the best since you know who. Breathing people made this record! People who show signs of doing what they condemn the world for not doing: changing, evolving, experimenting with new approaches, growing. And that's why Photon Wave Orchestra-- along with Jeremiah, Blaise Finnegan and every other prophet of doom-- might all turn out to be wrong. Perhaps it does get better before it gets worse. And you can't wait to dive back in and try to prove that wrong over and over. Photon Wave Orchestra tapped into the collective unconscious of those who grew up in the English speaking East and were talented enough to transcribe the soundtrack. No need to get hung up on specifics; however we lived and whoever we were, Echoes Across the Astral Wastelands reflected back the truth for a lot of us. You can't ask more of an album than that, and I don’t think we’ll see something like this ever again, and we will always return for what PWO’s EP debut alone can deliver. I realize that this is not a doujin album, but it needs to be heard. It needs to be recognized. It needs to be spread so as that it doesn’t fade away from our memories. Don’t let this treasure slip out of our hands. Clench it, and never let go.at this is what it must sound like. The experience and emotions tied to listening to this extended play are like witnessing the stillborn birth of a child while simultaneously having the opportunity to see her play in the afterlife on Imax. It's an album of sparking paradox. It's cacophonous yet tranquil, experimental yet familiar, foreign yet womb-like, spacious yet visceral, textured yet vaporous, awakening yet dreamlike, infinite yet 35 minutes. It will cleanse your brain of those little crustaceans of worries and inferior albums clinging inside the fold of your gray matter. The harrowing sounds hit from unseen angles and emanate with inhuman genesis. When the headphones peel off, and it occurs that two people created this, it's clear that Photon Wave Orchestra must be the greatest band alive, if not the best since you know who. Breathing people made this record! People who show signs of doing what they condemn the world for not doing: changing, evolving, experimenting with new approaches, growing. And that's why Photon Wave Orchestra-- along with Jeremiah, Blaise Finnegan and every other prophet of doom-- might all turn out to be wrong. Perhaps it does get better before it gets worse. And you can't wait to dive back in and try to prove that wrong over and over. Photon Wave Orchestra tapped into the collective unconscious of those who grew up in the English speaking East and were talented enough to transcribe the soundtrack. No need to get hung up on specifics; however we lived and whoever we were, Echoes Across the Astral Wastelands reflected back the truth for a lot of us. You can't ask more of an album than that, and I don’t think we’ll see something like this ever again, and we will always return for what PWO’s EP debut alone can deliver. I realize that this is not a doujin album, but it needs to be heard. It needs to be recognized. It needs to be spread so as that it doesn’t fade away from our memories. Don’t let this treasure slip out of our hands. Clench it, and never let go.