- The Detroit artist explores themes of rewilding Earth through dexterous rhythms and gorgeous ambient dreamlands.
- In 2020, Tristan Arp was in a particularly generative creative period while living in Mexico City. At the time, EPs full of leftfield polyrhythms and years spent co-running the New York label Human Pitch had made him a distinct voice in biomorphic electronic music. But while working on his second album, Sculpturegardening, he sought a more conceptual framework: how do you make cold machines come to life through organic, floral rhythms?
The Detroit-born artist's friendship with Guatemalan cellist and vocalist Mabe Fratti led to some spectacular outcomes. For this project, Fratti taught Arp how to play the cello in order to smoothe out the rugged edges of Arp's synthesis, like dollops of phlox forming around spiky shrubs. The arrangements on his third album, a pool, a portal, translate nature's innate rhythms with similar blooming textures. Fratti's involvement shines again here as her wordless vocals reach skyward on "ways of being," where a gamelan-like synth paddles above watery modular rhythms. Fratti also helped Arp learn cello—the harvest of which finds its way onto tracks like "in regrowth," where warm, high-pitched synth blends naturally with cello.
Arp wrote a pool, a portal using improvisations and live sessions, often recorded in a single take. "I neglected to record multi-track outs, but it was actually super empowering to be left with just a stereo track," he told Clash. "I couldn't mix individual elements even if I wanted to after the recording." These improvisational sketches led him away from the microhouse and glitch of Sculpturegardening into an effervescent swirl of ambient and IDM. Prisms of cello, piano and spoken word create an amoebic effect—his rhythms forgo the rigidity of machines, appearing more like scattered points that reveal a mossy mosaic upon zooming out. While many albums exploring the relationship between nature and machines lean pessimistic, Arp doesn't see dystopia in our future. Instead, he conjures images of a future where humans and machines live in symbiosis.
The opening track, "a piece of silence," outlines this message straight away. In it, a warped vocal comes into focus: "One day you'll see this place come to life again, its creatures returning," bringing to mind a future in which biohybrids totter over desolate, sun-cracked land. The nearly 11-minute "life after humans" builds onto this narrative, unveiling new layers—chopped vocal samples, piano notes drooping downstream—every minute, like a petri dish teeming with life. "a scattered meaning" inserts us into a later stage of this sci-fi future: human sputterings clash with flowering modulations, like the Earth regrowing itself, while AI develops new languages to communicate with plant life. The collage of found sound and distorted spoken word brings to mind the reverse tape experimentation of folktronica pioneers like The Books.
On the album's longest tracks, the production's pointillist quality sharpens every moment into a dotted rhythm, creating a surprising effect in which time seems to still and speed up simultaneously. Because of this, it's easy to become absorbed in Arp's alien worlds, and length matters little. Sticky modular rhythms puncture harp-like pings throughout the nearly five-minute "time dilation," recalling the strange machine sentience of Objekt's Cocoon Crush LP. a pool, a portal ends with one of its longest cuts, the arrhythmic "beneath the world staring upwards." For over ten minutes, strings become thin details within waves of ambient pads, and with a solid pay-off: as the final seconds fade to black, it feels as though we're floating away from the world we once knew.
There's a vital sense of effortless ease on a pool, a portal. Arp's hypernatural vision is one that prioritises joy, making it so the constant outbreaks of complexity never feel stifling or overworked. The album showcases incredible restraint in its denser moments, which are always nimble enough to add more groove and improvisational flow, rather than overcrowding it. Sound art can be smart and fun. On the LP, Arp's reconciliation between musical maturity and youthful buoyancy repeatedly pulls us into a trance-like state.
Tracklist01. a piece of silence
02. ways of being feat. Mabe Fratti
03. a pool, a portal
04. life after humans
05. in regrowth
06. time dilation
07. a scattered meaning
08. invisible cities
09. beneath the world staring upwards