On Angel Deradoorian’s debut album, she closed one door and opened a dozen more. Up until that point, the Sacramento-born musician had spent most of her career supporting other people: most famously as a member of Dave Longstreth’s Dirty Projectors and Avey Tare’s Slasher Flicks, but also singing backup for Brandon Flowers, Charli XCX, Flying Lotus, and even U2. Finally, though, in order to say “yes” to her own instincts—there had been no solo work since her debut EP, in 2009—she had to say “no” to everyone else. The result was 2015’s The Expanding Flower Planet, an almost entirely self-made album in which Deradoorian found her voice by throwing her arms wide open to possibility. Jewel-toned keyboards, Middle Eastern scales, dizzyingly multi-tracked vocal harmonies over a mercurial psych-rock firmament—the album was hybrid to the core, stylistically polyglot, voracious in its embrace of the wider world.
On the follow-up, in what feels like an equally strategic move, she has begun closing doors again. Just six songs and 29 minutes long, Eternal Recurrence sounds like an attempt to zoom in on just one facet of The Expanding Flower Planet—namely, its heady, spiritual undercurrent—and blow it up to larger-than-life size. Hushed, meditative, and bathed in an amber glow, Eternal Recurrence feels like a church service, or a séance. It begins with warm synths that could almost be organs; Deradoorian follows her voice to the edge of language, tracing shapes against quivering drones. The shifts between minor and major are like the intermingling of colors through a rose window.
Patient and repetitive, the opening “Love Arise” is faintly reminiscent of Philip Glass’ Koyaanisqatsi or Meredith Monk’s Book of Days. Setting Deradoorian’s vocal harmonies against chords bristling with overtones, and making the most of her swooping glissandi, it uses minimalism as a springboard to dive into an array of microtonal frequencies. The patient mood of the first song blows into wide-open reverie on “Return-Transcend,” an eight-minute meditation in which Deradoorian traces Middle Eastern runs over hurdy-gurdy drones. It’s vaguely reminiscent of the incense-laced, liturgical mood of Dead Can Dance—but the early, gothic Dead Can Dance, before their schmaltzier instincts got the better of them—and from there the record goes fully new age. “Ausar Temple,” whose title references the Egyptian god of the underworld, is nothing but two-and-a-half minutes of tolling bells, intermittent gongs, and running water engulfed in cavernous reverb.
To get here, she has had to excise some of the things that made her debut album so exciting: The variety, the unpredictability, the hummability. The Expanding Flower Planet is an avant-pop album as riotous as a medieval public square; Eternal Recurrence, its fluid tones draped like the garnet robes of a mystical order, takes a vow of austerity. Fortunately, the B-side’s three tracks step outside the hermit’s lair and back toward actual song form. “Nia in the Dark,” led by solemn electric bass, makes for a post-punk-inspired playground for her vocal experiments; “Mountainside” is a hothouse of piano and flute, and the closing “Mirrorman” is a kind of secular psalm not unlike Breadwoman’s spiritual minimalism.
Throughout, Deradoorian’s voice is the main attraction. Wispy one moment, bellowing full-throated the next, and capable of dazzling melismatic runs, it remains her not-so-secret weapon. It carries the music even when her lyrics don’t feel as transcendent as the subject matter calls for. Eternal Recurrence concerns itself with love’s transcendent power, but where her melodies soar effortlessly, her rhyming couplets (“Love in the morning when I open up my eyes/Love in the evening when the fading sunset dies”) can feel clunky, programmatic—earthbound instead of weightless.
In any kind of tradeoff, the question is always going to be: Was it worth it? And the answer here is yes, albeit with an asterisk attached. Short and potent, the mini-album benefits from its focused mood; I don’t mean to slight it to say that it would surely make for a good accompaniment to yoga or meditation. Unlike her boisterous debut album, it is a calming listen that lends itself to journeys into inner space, even if the lyrics can sometimes be distracting. Some of the record’s best moments are swirled deeply into the mix and arise without warning—like the strange, groaning bass gurgle that closes “Return-Transcend” in a flurry of synthetic whale song, or the closing coda of “Mountainside,” in which a tape-warped buzz hiccups expectantly. It’s in moments like this, where the music feels like it has a mind of its own, that the narrow focus of Eternal Recurrence leads to what feels like an infinite array of passageways, each one offering a potential way forward for the project.
