Infinity Frequencies
Into The Light

2015

 

 

 

 

Into The Light is the first physical release of the ever-mysterious Infinity Frequencies, a 21-track album released at the vapor headquarters Dream Catalogue on 100 limited cassettes, available to purchase and stream at Bandcamp as always. The front artwork may show a rather crestfallen, ultimately soul-crushing scenery, but there’s light aplenty scattered over the course of the album, or else it wouldn’t be called Into The Light, for this is indeed the direction the traveler is about to take: away from the darkness, into the light. This premise is of course mobbed up quite a bit when a particularly laid-back tune is followed by two darker dioramas, but rest assured that positivism and vitalism shall win at the end of the day, if only for the exogenous fact that Infinity Frequencies has created previous tracks that are titled The Light Is Your Guide. Despite featuring 21 tracks, the journey of Infinity Frequencies is rather short, with not a single track ever crossing the mark of two and a half minutes. In addition, everything is willfully and transparently loop-based, but expertly realized regardless, with no striking cusps, stitches or lap joints. And yet we get definite, indubitable loops of twilight and hatched colors. Here is a more meticulous look at the basic columns, cornerstones and promises of the album with the aid of a few particularly lilting or disturbing examples, based on the respective case in point. Into The Light is a polyvalent circulator after all.

 

Even the tapes feature the lucent vertical test pattern. Photograph by Dream Catalogue owner HKE.

 

There is a pressing darkness within, amid and around the peritonea that cover the abdominal aureoles. It doesn’t take a genius to notice that: front artwork and album title work in tandem in order to guide the listener, there’s no foul play. But there is an ignis fatuus alright, a torchlight at best or incandescent chirality at worst, playing tricks, leading to phantom paths, raising false hopes. The eponymous opener Into The Light is already the longest entity of Infinity Frequencies’ tape, clocking in a bit over two minutes and twenty seconds. The antediluvian gravitas is immediately recognizable, a feat that is repeated ad inifintum in the given boundaries. There is lachrymosity too; vermillion verglas strings gyre around a vitreous core, aqueous hi-hats splash in close proximity… and that’s the basic gist of the whole loop. Another Time is a constituent of similar proportions, a one-minute blueprint of a looped Trip Hop sample with a yearning female vocalist in-between a caproic tenor saxophone, all the while From The Inside revs up the adaxial flow and places a Japanese announcer in pectiniform strings of magnanimity.

 

The trick – if you want to call it that – of placing alkaliphilic soothingness in these dungeoneered stokehold memories is an important premise of Infinity Frequencies’ endeavor, again comprehensibly self-chosen by the album title and the biomorphic opacity that is injected with every note. These are the surroundings. The innermost logical rule, however, is the loop. Everything is looped, everything repeats, and as every electronic music lover in general and Vaporwave follower in particular knows, it is the perfect loop which makes the repetition not only tolerable, but essential for a track’s enchanting physiognomy. One of the three most haunting loops are as follows: A Cold Breath serves as the multiplex of short-lived – but naturally instantly repeated – ocean waves which beguile the titular inhalation and suitably glacial electric piano ribcages, adding a bustling intensity to a potentially petrifying state. Then there’s Leaving which stands out due to its laissez-faire elevator erethism. Basically a guitar-driven muzak mica, the loop surprises with its equimolar titration between viscid glissando riffs and chinking tambourines. Chlorotic light and enigmatic darkness meet yet again in Memories Echoed In Time whose silkened four-note p(i)anorama is hued in digital tape hiss. The wear marks of the loop are specifically noticeable here, but its parochial narrowness and monoclinic micrometry are anything but a warning sign, a spine-tingling anagnorisis.

 

The third column which is so important for the album strongly depends on the listener’s expectation, mood and heritage. One paragraph of this review recounted the similitude between darkness and light, another was reserved for the omnipresence of the loop as the principal raison d’être, and this here section is driven by my very own search for harmonious undertones, no matter how fragile or superimposed they may seem. Turns out that Into The Light has many of these electropositive elements embroidered into the tracks, and it is these good-natures fermions and particles that make the album title work even stronger. After all, we are supposed to wander into the light instead of, well, moving away from it. And so it happens that many lycopods are featured on this album, be it the pitch-shifted two-note jingle phragmoplast Secrets whose existence of 40 seconds is the steamiest vapor vestibule ever, the humorous-purified dualism of Faces with its panpipes puissance, magic chimes and rustic manservant toasts, or the Jazz-driven proto-Vaporwave epitome Together with its saltatory tenor sax, dry bass guitar phytoliths and a breakbeat-oriented classic drum kit groove. You can’t spell delight without light, thankfully so.

 

Into The Light is a difficile collection of sporophytes, despite being open to scrutiny and perfectly envisioned by the triad of album title, front artwork and loop-based compositions. The reason for its eclectic appearance is the cautiously depicted encounter of darkness and light, hope and despair and other opposite pairings. You don’t know what to expect in the next segue, the surprise level is held up high all the time, and it is this fact that is so unexpectedly astonishing, for the craftsmanship of Infinity Frequencies is purposefully focused on the loop and the curation thereof. What constitutes the loop, however, is up for debate, built anew, becoming iconoclastic due to sudden beams of light only to then succumb to the nocturnal solanum in the next instance. One could say: the darkness is autochthonous, the nucleic epicenter of each and every vignette and arrangement that makes up the roster of 21 tracks. This isn’t 100% true, but it is at least a truism, because even in the frillier, tongue-in-cheek faunae, a cathartic cleansing cannot take place due to the gravitational ubiquity and constant interferometry of the charcoal state. At least there is no redshift ingrained, no apocalyptic-apoplectic adage. The angular momentum is hued in light. It is this momentum that I want to cherish. If your mileage varies, all the better: Into The Light enshrines your specific portentous needs as well.

 

Further listening and reading:

 

Vaporwave Review 104: Infinity Frequencies – Into The Light (2015). Originally published on Jul. 2, 2015 at AmbientExotica.com.