Anenon's Petrol is bookended by the sounds of freeway noise, so you don't have to look very far to find the meaning behind the title. But it's fortuitous that the album, with its viscous, reverberant swirls of reeds and violin, has the same dusky resonance as the color. If this is an album about Anenon's native Los Angeles, the setting is somewhere just past sundown, the sky steadily leeched of color as lines of cars streak toward the horizon like rivers full of embers.
Anenon is Brian Allen Simon, an electronic producer and saxophone player, and Petrol is his third album. It represents a major step forward for him. His debut, 2012's Inner Hue, evoked Tycho and the Field in its shimmering ambient sketches and crisp drums; 2014's Sagrada went further in its pursuit of a new kind of beat music composed using acoustic instruments, Fender Rhodes, and tons of reverb. But its rhythms lacked distinction—"Lights and Rocks" was basically an Aphex Twin pastiche, and the TR-808 sounds elsewhere on the album seemed out of place—while his saxophone melodies sometimes scanned as rote. But Petrol, a looser, messier album, does a better job of communicating new ideas, and its emotional depth feels less gestural and more genuine.
The album's raw material comes from an improvisation session alongside violinist Yvette Holzwarth and bass clarinetist Max Kaplan; back in his studio, working with the drummer Jon-Kyle Mohr, he reworked those tapes, cutting and resampling them into their final, hybrid electronic form. The opening "Body" is typical for the album, with cool, analog-style synthesizers and the humming of distant cars creating a buoyant cushion for Simon's melancholy saxophone riffing. The mood is evocative of Vangelis' Blade Runner soundtrack, but elsewhere things are less placid and misty-eyed; the drums on "Once" and "CXP" recreate the head-over-heels tumble of drum 'n' bass, inspiring greater urgency in Simon's sax work. "Mouth" and "Petrol," meanwhile, bring to mind Philip Glass' work. Simon has described how the album was partly inspired by the experience of standing on a pedestrian walkway above the freeway—"I found a sense of Zen in that as I was making the record," he told the Fader—and it's easy to hear parallels between the spinning chrome wheels his music evokes and the sped-up industrial choreography of the Glass-scored Koyaanisqatsi.
But some of the finest moments on Petrol turn out to be the simplest. "Hinoki" is nothing but two minutes of downcast sax melody over fathomless reverb, and "Panes" takes a similar idea and adds a bassline fashioned from bleating bass clarinet. In the first few seconds of "Panes," a human voice is briefly audible—as far as I can make out, it says "Maybe"—before it disappears into the murk again. It's the only voice on the album, but its appearance seems fitting; if Petrol's twin themes are the way that cars and distance define the experience of Los Angeles, that snippet of speech is what creates a sense of human scale before the album's lonely denouement, when everything that has come before disappears beneath the din of freeway noise.
