There's much to be said for exploring opposites. With Bible Eyes, his 2011 debut album as Egyptrixx, Toronto-based producer David Psutka took a widescreen approach to his mining of the fertile, boundary-less ground of London dance music label Night Slugs. Bible Eyes ran the gamut from lush to harsh, juxtaposed bass and synth in various contortions, and even toyed with guest vocals. Most importantly, it established his knack for seemingly effortless, deeply evocative arpeggiated melodies.
On A/B til Infinity, he flips the mode to zoom. The album focuses in on a specific realm—one he hinted at but abandoned with Bible Eyes’ opener “Start From The Beginning”—and comes off like a study or a soundtrack. Repeated motifs of rain and sirens, metallic surfaces and a sense of impending doom, point to a space between film noir and dystopian sci-fi. It is an underbelly world he traverses, one caught between the audible fizz of digital distraction and the sharp demand for material possessions. Water drips, signals fail, desires echo.
The album’s evocations are overwhelmingly literary, if somewhat familiar. The subdued grandiosity of “Bad Boy” calls to mind Alan Moore’s iconic graphic novel Watchmen, while its sister “Adult” invokes the dual feeling of intrigue and unease that is central to the work of J.G. Ballard. The synthetic choral voices of “Disorbital” stir a feeling of absence, one that Blade Runner fans might associate with the replicant’s fate to mourn memories it never had.
That’s not to say A/B til Infinity doesn’t have musical bedfellows. Atmosphere-wise, lines can be drawn to Kuedo’s majestic Severant (which also riffed on some of the same themes), while “Adult” feels in conversation with the taut conceptualization of Night Slugs comrade Jam City’s debut Classical Curves. While Psutka’s self-proclaimed love of black metal and his recent experience as one half of experimental post-rock/psychedelic duo Hiawatha aren’t exactly strikingly evident on this second Egyptrixx album, there is a newfound single-minded moodiness that could be credited to the influence of both. There’s no question that A/B til Infinity marks a distinct evolution: it has a stronger, more cohesive identity than Bible Eyes, but where it falls down is when it wallows in that guise. Both “Water” and “My Life is Vivid, My Eyes are Open” feel a little sludgy: their pulse is quicker but the blood runs cold.
Rather, in keeping with the titular theme, the record’s crowning glories are two sides of a flipped coin: the title track’s searing arpeggio that swims closest to the exquisite melodies of Bible Eyes (“Rooks Theme” and “Naples”) and the ambient elevation of final track “A.C.R.R.”. The latter closes the circle on the film noir ambience, shutting out the rain to embark on an internal journey. There is a sense of limbs and lungs stretching, followed by the triumphant punch through to a higher plane.
