In the hushed monologues that fill Wayne Phoenix’s debut album, the pianist, composer, and producer describes his stormy inner life with halting half-thoughts. He “doesn’t know what it means to be secure.” He’s “been living without the earth beneath [him].” He rejects the grandiosity of romantic love; he mulls the nature of loneliness. He doesn’t expand much on the circumstances that inspired these ruminations—nor has he publicly offered much biographical information about himself—which lends the record a ghostly quality. It’s a bit like finding an old photo album with most of its pages torn out. Phoenix trusts you to fill in the empty spaces.
soaring wayne phoenix story the earth is mostly muted and forlorn. Phoenix intones gravely at the start of the opening track “Mood” that he’s “singing the story of my life so far,” accompanied by washes of white noise, lapping electronics, and a vocal sample stretched and warped into an inhuman wail. Occasionally, he evokes the rain-slicked desperation of Leyland Kirby, and some of the synth work feels as cold and gleaming as those of his compatriots on Rabit’s Halcyon Veil label. But the way Phoenix treats his samples and sounds, swaddling them in blankets of hiss or warping them into unrecognizable forms, makes them feel personal and unique.
Only three of the record’s nine tracks are longer than two minutes, which lends the record a flickering, quicksilver energy, as if Phoenix’s mind is working too quickly to stick to a single thought. You can hear this restlessness in his vocal passages, the way he gives up on sentences halfway through, grasping for the right ideas, then undercutting himself by fading the volume in moments where it seems like words might fail him. This energy is what separates soaring wayne phoenix from ambient music; for as much meditating as Phoenix does on this record, he rarely sits still.
This approach allows Phoenix to try out more emotions than the overwhelming sadness of these compositions might suggest. While his spoken-word pieces often mirror the music, he also strikes notes of peace and hope. “Burn False Messages” opens with the assertion that he doesn’t “want to be anyone’s beloved,” but it closes with a reflection on the necessity of interdependence and the endurance of the human spirit. “Alone,” surprisingly, considers the happiness and sense of ease one can find in isolation.
According to an account provided to Boomkat, this music spent 10 years “filed away in a drawer.” Whether this was meant literally or not, there’s something poetic about these pieces sitting forgotten for so long. They are full of the complicated wisdom that only reveals itself with time. It’s the sound of a person slowly figuring the world out for themselves.
