Within the mid-Nineteen Nineties, Jon Tye was relentlessly targeted on digital music’s most excessive potentialities. That was the title of the inaugural compilation from his label, Lo Recordings, which aimed to map the fringes of post-rave digital music in category-smashing experiments from artists like Scanner, Omni Trio, and Luke Vibert’s Wagon Christ challenge. Lo Recordings spent the following few years pushing outward, breaking down distinctions between genres and modes of listening on comps like United Mutations and Additional Mutations, enlisting a provocatively motley crew—Aphex Twin, Tortoise, Hood, Thurston Moore, Squarepusher, Stereolab—of their demolition work.
Most excessive of all was the music Tye launched below his personal Twisted Science alias, by turns erratic and overdriven or dusty and dissonant. However he additionally had different, mellower initiatives, and as time has passed by, the dulcet aspect of his music has come to the fore. In 2021, the ambient historians at Music From Reminiscence curated a star-gazing choice of the ambient and ambient techno he produced within the early Nineteen Nineties in MLO, a duo with fellow Brit Peter Smith; now the label turns its consideration to his ambient challenge Ocean Moon. Methods to the Deep Meadow’s seven atmospheric tracks are all new productions, however their billowing pads, gently pulsing arpeggios, and common air of wide-eyed surprise sound so basic, it might be straightforward to mistake the album for an archival launch.
The temper all through bobs someplace between tranquil and hypnotic, starting with the prayer bowl and rainfall that open “Methods to the Deep Meadow.” That track—impressed by a poem by Angus MacLise, who performed in the Velvet Underground and La Monte Younger’s Theatre of Everlasting Music earlier than transferring to Nepal—is led by gently biking synth arpeggios whose curious rises and falls remind me of certainly one of M.C. Escher’s staircases. “Souls Fall Away” is a buoyant froth of beatific, if indecipherable, vocals, and “Angel Falls,” a couple of tracks later, evokes related heavenliness. Issues actually solely come right down to earth twice: “Day of the Voyage” is a blissed-out procession led by a halting digital drum sample evocative of Indian music; “Plains of Paradise” is a Balearic devotional pushed by rippling congas.
Per label press supplies, parts of the album had been apparently impressed by synthetic intelligence, as Tye sought alternate options—theoretical, philosophical, and even religious—to what he noticed as extra pessimistic or essential views. It’s unclear, nevertheless, whether or not he really used A.I. instruments in producing or organizing his sounds, or just took inspiration, like several science-fiction author, from the thought of the expertise. Within the angelic choirs and digital pulses of “Methods to the Deep Meadow,” it’s actually doable to understand a way of optimism about expertise, and press supplies say that Holly Herndon’s Holly+ app was used to course of textual content from Janine Rook’s Made in Desires, the exhibition that Ocean Moon’s track of the identical title was created to soundtrack. However no phrases are detectable in that track, and happily nothing on Methods to the Deep Meadow bears traces of low-fidelity artifacts or different telltale marks of A.I. slop.