Arcadian Rhythms by Guilo

Simon Christophers’ Guilo project produces music of arcadian beauty and of circadian disquiet, a sound that is both joyous and disturbing, reverential and satanic.  Ancient Tracks, the first single from Guilo in 5 years is the first one that feels as if one has been given an invite into a private world of secret thoughts and delicate delights that allows one to forget the plunge into dystopia.

Ancient Tracks is the product of what Guilo has described as an extended period of pleasured anxiety, and it sounds like it, full of wraithlike frequencies and fibrillating pulses. That’s not a huge surprise: Guilos material has always sounded delightfully anxious… Incline Thine Ears (2011), Simon Christophers debut outing as Guilo, largely succeeded in channeling the decade’s post-millennium tension into compellingly moody abstractions. Later that year, flushed on creative freedoms Guitarra compiled outakes and collaborations that contrasted Incline Thine Ear’s singularity  – mining many a similar vien but digging up rarer ore with the help of cohorts (relationships that he has rekindled and added to, augment this latest release).

And through those associations, Christophers,  long a fan of left-of-center music, pulls in sonic references (modal and harmonic) from the vanguard, moving beyond contemporary fashion. Yet for all the music’s heavy structure, it isn’t obviously mapped to a rhythmic grid: It slips and slides all over the place, wheezy melodica feints… synths rise, timables lead.

Ancient Tracks is a complex and involving instrumental journey through delicate and disturbed electronica and nu folk/nu classical. But more than all that, it is genuinely very beautiful.

TRACK LISTING
01. Arcadian Rhythms (3:34)
02. Autonomous sensory meridian response (5:14)