Review: ARP – The Soft Wave
ARP - The Soft Wave (2010) [Smalltown Supersound] // Grade: B
The Soft Wave is music that hovers in the twilight, a transition of a thing, one stage to the next. Arp mastermind Alexis Georgopolous once described his ambient electro as “summer ending and autumn beginning”, but this second release recalls even more: black night to dawn, inland to coast, teenagerdom to whatever comes next. Not simply a series of opposites, but the literal stasis between Points A and B.
It’s a wistful thing, that stasis. And The Soft Wave is a wistful album, if for no other reason than the chords strike that chord, you know, the difficult-to-pinpoint emotional clusterfuck of nostalgia and hope-filled ambition all at once. We’ve learned it from the movies; we’ve know it from TV. When incidental music goes like this—a minor suddenly finding a major, warm and analogue moments like white-tipped waves—we’re trained to suspect the end of something.
And in that sense, this album is equal to Arp’s 2007 debut. Maybe even better, if emotional brilliance outpaces technical—and the experience of non-stop work outpaces that. Georgopolous has, after all, accomplished loads in the interim: scored the modern-dance Replica and Doug Aitken’s film Migration, remixed Lindstrom, released some stuff with other band The Alps. He also moved from San Francisco to New York, which makes one wonder: is this man’s life anything but transition? Whatever tendency he gets out of his system, however, whenever, isn’t he constantly shuffling from this thing to the next?
Well, yeah. Hence the album’s affection for minimalism, an affection stronger than even In Light‘s most stripped moments. Clean white rooms, a paring down; this one song about this one melody and nothing else. “Alfa” and its psych guitar. The shock of milky vocals on “From A Balcony Overlooking The Sea”. The “High Life” implication of steel drum, how it suggests all these vacationy elements without actually using them. If the preset-reminiscent beats feel exhausted by the end—the one bit that’s a nagging constant—it’s only because your focus is meant to be elsewhere. I just spent so much time as a kid playing with the built-in Casio accompaniment, it’s tough to hear much else. Ignore me. The intention is pure. And so are the jams, these creamy and organic things evocative enough to conjure a weepy eyed mess. The Soft Wave is Arp at its most bone-bare: the reality of nostalgia and our so-wistful stasis, soundtracked.
