Arp – Pulsars e Quasars

A Soundtrack to Your Catharsis

Arp is Alexis Georgopoulos, and he’s got four releases under his belt – the latest one, an EP, is titled Pulsars e Quasars. Now the title may seem like somewhat of a headache, but the music doesn’t confuse our ears or our minds with complicated production. While sounding spacey and grand, Pulsars e Quasars is a little slice of tranquility in the noisier, mind-numbing genre of psych-pop.

Arp flips between two channels on this EP – one being the shoegazey, drowned-out catharses; the other being his cleaned up electronic tracks. He kicks off the EP with a track called “Suns,” a two-minute intro that fries our brains. It’s essentially the noises you hear on the surface of the sun- a gnarly fireball of scorched abstract reverb. It’s definitely not a track you’d play multiple times.

He then follows the intro with “Pulsars e Quasars,” a song with a surprisingly simple arrangement, given its name. If anything, the tone is a kind of laziness – we get the sense that the song wants to move faster, but it’s drugged up and is dragging it’s feet. The drums thump along in a daze, guitars twang here and there, and are later joined by angelic “ahhs.”

Georgopolous takes us on a celestial tour of the galaxy. On “UHF1,” he gives us a sense of what it’s like to fly through the stars: “Night has gone and all the cellophane too / slip into light and we won’t touch the ground.”  It’s not only the longest song on the EP– it’s the highlight of the tracklist. It’s a fusion of the cathartic waves of sound (tracks like “On Returning” and “Chrromatiques II – Extended Mix” which is the embodiment of this style) and the poppy-electronic bumpers that Georgopoulos intertwines on the EP. The latter half of “UHF1” is essentially an extended outro, drowning out all the percussion with reverb, all the strings bathed in it.

This outro sounds like a release of some kind, a type of emotion Georgopoulos is letting go of. And this is what Pulsars e Quasars is about – a getaway, a meditation, a peacefulness in which to let go.