I’m going to go out on a limb and call this ‘maths ambient’, a slumbersome palette of overtly friendly glitches, something akin to a CD player breaking down around the edges of a summer fire. Phexioenesystems music is nothing if not considered, its sound world suggesting no small amount of labour, the artist toiling over the nuance of their sound, a precise, highly sculpted affair.
You might be forgiven for complaining that nothing really happens: the typical BIG REVERB expanse of ambient 101 – the substance that allows one chord to last forever – is absent, and instead the listener basks in an ever evolving, but never attention-grabbing, scattered surface of odd percussives. Adjunct plucks, like the affected remnants of a guitar, repeat endlessly in the foreground, the occasional swell of a soft drone drifts in then out, and all the while a delicate modem dances gently across the edges.
There is nothing in the way of notable development – the track ends as it has begun, reinforcing its delicate, nuanced tone. In a better world this would be the hold music of telecom operators, elevator music: a sound that loiters in the background, quietly operating on some long gestating part of your brain. Much of Phexioenesystems music works this way – preferring to work steadily upon your intellect rather than grab you with the threat of big hooks or identifiable rhythms. Everything is distant, obfuscated, a vague stab at dance music filtered through the empty corpse of several hundred shuttered nightclubs, the sort of threadbare remnants no one would ever consider dancing to.
It’s effective, pensive stuff, drawing upon several strands of compositional practice without succumbing to any of theme. The recent E.P. on Castles in Space is case in point: shedding both the more open-ended qualities of ‘Inland Autumn Deerhorn’, and the early OPN arpeggiations of their ‘Shared System Studies’ (which is awesome, and you should run out and buy it), it borrows from the questionable palette of early 2000’s coffee table electronica, sounding like a massively reduced chill-out mix, like The Thievery Corporation if you were to play it at half speed and methodically removed anything that sounded too musical or interesting. And if that sounds like an insult, you’re probably listening to music wrong.
Links:
https://linktr.ee/phxsys
https://phexioenesystems.bandcamp.com/
Daniel Alexander Hignell-Tully
MEANS 