Look Around You - CD

2018 release. Faex Optim is an immigrant from another dimension, beamed in on fairyland constructs made up of colorful light beams and intoxicating aural spirits. On his second album for Carpe Sonum, he trades in a particularly bedeviled skein of pastoral electronica defined by equal parts hauntological menace and gothic whimsy. Tracks often deploy a cascading array of disembodied voices rented from a myriad of astral planes; rhythms, née pulses, whip agitatedly across the stereo field like sprites caught in gargantuan whirlpools; tentative piano notes look for peaceful climes to tether their forlorn cries to. Imagine a cross between the dandelion-wine landscapes of Boards of Canada and various artists spread across early sides from Morr Music and some of today's Ghost Box contingent and you're about halfway there. But truth be told, Faex Optim's sound is not one born from derivative measures but rather a culmination of all the shift-hop strides and quake basket morning trills that once were common coin amongst contemplative '90s electronica. But now the birds have come home to roost, and the sublime, kaleidoscopic dots and loops so favored by their ancestors have found a home in the becalming, clever motifs eked out so splendidly by Faex Optim.