Imagine a world where upsammy’s music is pumped into nurseries and kindergartens, shaping children from birth. It’d be a world without wars, where kindness reigned and malice was snuffed in the cradle. Dutch artist Thessa Torsing’s tunes are practically the inverse of the abrasive, perpetually stimulating, highly synthetic music that typically thrives in the electronic scene today. She’s worked with a number of prestigious labels and venues—from Unsound and Panorama Bar to Dekmantel and PAN, including a formative residency at Amsterdam’s De School. As her profile has risen, her music has only gotten looser and lighter, a Gaussian blur of IDM and moonlit ambient. Exquisite real-world samples, like slowed-down rustling leaves, litter her musical petri dishes. A student of landscape architecture, she has spoken about the ways that she conceptualizes her music in similar terms, with layers of sound in place of bedrock, soil, flora and fauna, and human-built structures.
Everything about Strange Meridians feels organic, from the raw samples and childlike swirl to the packaging. The record was pressed on 180 grams of bio-vinyl and comes with a poem Torsing wrote that seems to obliquely reference a lost or damaged relationship. “You talk back/but I can’t hear you/something springs forth/somewhere/a remnant that remains,” the poem ends. The eight tracks don’t offer any clues about what story is unfolding, but maybe these are the remnants—the barely-there plot points of a personal odyssey.
The album’s mostly drumless sound is woven out of calming twinkles and soft drones that resemble anthropomorphic ocarinas yawning in the twilight. The effect is like floating along a lazy river flanked by a fairytale forest of red lanterns and carefree animal gatherings. It’s the kind of music that fills my brain with made-up gibberish, words that grope feebly toward capturing the music’s elusive textures and atmospheres—heaven oak, frogswath symphony, swishing nucleus, crustacean whisker. The hectic feel of upsammy’s earlier tracks—the chime-churn of “It Drips,” the hiccuping chaos of “Constructing”—is nowhere to be found. Where her earlier music could resemble a butterfly, shimmering with color and quivering rhythms, Strange Meridians is a kind of reverse metamorphosis, enveloping the artist in a cocoon of cozy stillness.
Track titles reflect the shift toward serenity: “Aqualizing,” “Cosmo,” “Edge of Sleep.” They say, It’s okay to lose focus—this is music for the inattention economy, lullabies guiding you to radiant dreaming. These tender songs’ drowsiness is never dreary. The womblike drift of “Cosmo” reminds me of Legend of Zelda open-world exploration themes, or video-game pause-screen music—subdued, to signal a break in the action, yet so entrancing that you might stop the game just to hear the soundtrack. Torsing has a knack for tension and spacing, letting low-key synths steal the spotlight, before gradually introducing more sounds and petering others out. “Edge of Sleep” unfurls like the most Xanax-relaxed orchestra ever, each sound softly passing the baton to another, then curtsying away. It’s lovely to bed-rot in these worlds, squinting your ears to hear the whispered language in “Mazing” or letting the oozing ASMR slime and stippling kicks of “Spiral Biting Its Tail” caress your brain.
There’s a rising SoundCloud scene—botanica, or petalcore, some call it — that fuses the digital and biological in similar ways, rupturing pastoral idylls with sudden glitches and 4K-sharp synths. upsammy is as much a godmother of this sound as more frequently mentioned progenitors like Porter Robinson and Alexander Panos. Listening eyes closed to “The Guest,” visions of another, prettier world irrigate my brain—a landscape unsullied by human greed and environmental abuse. The song begins with a naked recording of nature, insects chirping and water rushing, before icicle keys and what sound like dolphin whimpers start doodling on the surface. It makes me feel like I’ve gone to heaven, gazing down at the world from some angelic vantage point, able to take in both the panoramic totality and the bustle of creation in all its tiny whirring movements. It reminds me that we’re all just visitors here, ephemeral specks in an ever-shifting soundscape.
