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Music

Arp's New Single Is a Genre-Defying Instrumental From Other Worlds

The always-surprising composer born Alexis Georgopoulos will release a new album called 'ZEBRA' on June 22, and "Fluorescences" is the first psychedelic taste.
Photo by Shawn Brackbill

Alexis Georgopoulos—the New York composer, producer, and writer—has always seemed to approach music with a surprising openmindedness. You can see it even in thetracklists of the DJ mixes he hosts on his website, sets he’s thrown together over the course of the last five years that frequently ping-pong between hermetic indie pop, industrial ambience, shimmering disco hits, and grayscale italian minimalists. He’ll throw in a Fleetwood Mac song on occasion, or a tropicalia great, or a German prog rarity; his sets seem to argue that all this music exists in the same universe. Why not attempt to highlight the connections?

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That philosophical approach is also one Georgopoulos has brought to the music he’s made under the name Arp. Since 2007, he’s issued a string of barely categorizable recordings, dipping into deep wells of drippy ambience, scribbly psych jams, and glittery prog-pop songwriting of the Eno-esque tradition. Sometimes he does this all on the same release—there’s bits of all of it on 2010’s The Soft Wave—but mostly he seems to use each recorded moment as a document of a where his head’s at the time conceptually. United only by a penchant for analog synthesizers and a general aversion for standard rock or pop arrangements, the Arp catalog is an endearing grab bag of heady compositions—this record might be a baroque songwriter record, that one might contain chilly drones. All of them feel deep, well-informed, and full of love for whatever sounds are filling his brain that time around.

On June 22, Georgopoulos will expand into another zone entirely with his fifth full-length ZEBRA. Drawing on his history in ambient composition and his affinity for complex rhythmic interplay, it’s a collection of instrumentals that feels equally indebted to the genteel malleted percussion of 80s Japanese ambient music, the roiling contortions of fusion-y jazz, proggy compositional backflips, and the sunrise sonics of new age music. It’s dense and otherworldly, but generally peaceful somewhere underneath the tangled thickets of instrumentation. It’s the sort of thing that sounds intensely labored over, but Georgopoulos says the basic ideas came together relatively quickly by his standards. While playing music on a beach with the multi-instrumentalist Ezra Feinberg, he happened upon a “watershed moment.”

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“We’d learned some alternate tunings that Joni Mitchell had used on The Hissing of Summer Lawns and Hejira and something just … clicked,” he writes via email. “Some strange, unknown doorway just opened. I just felt a new possibility and a clear direction. I went home and sketched out almost the entire album in the next 48 hours. It just all came flooding out.”

Given the complexity of pieces like “Fluorescences”—a near-six-minute assemblage of overlapping percussion, buoyant synth lines, and guitar line as tense as an exercise band, premiering here—such bizarre sparks of inspiration and creative rushes seem antithetical. But Georgopoulos explains that tracks like this would iterate a lot as he worked on them. Of “Fluorescences” specifically, he says that it was “one of those funny instances when something begins one way and then ends up taking a turn.”

The song started with a guitar line, which in the finished version doesn’t come into the song until a minute in, but then he had an idea to include a hand drum, and when the hand drum player arrived, he brought the jaw of an animal—he isn’t sure exactly which—which also eventually made its way into the collage of rhythms. With some help from Feinberg and Jay Israelson, he piled on drum machines, malleted percussion, and those droopy synth parts. “It felt right,” he says. “And weird. The combination of the very natural, organic percussion with the very 80s digital synths created something really intriguing, I thought. It had something very natural and also alien about it, like a sort of neon spring glow.”

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ZEBRA vibrates with that kind of energy throughout, swooning and sagging with the piecemeal accumulation of memorable melodies and strange instrumentation. That structure, Georgopoulos says, was first inspired when he was thinking about how he DJs, and how his favorite DJs structure sets.

“[My favorite DJs] would never let narrow-minded ideas about ‘genre’ dictate what they play,” he says. “With a mix, you’re able to create a scope, a way to tie in different musical styles and make interesting connections. This isn’t really how most musical artists approach making their own albums though, is it? To do this well, of course, takes a breadth of knowledge, and a sense of history.”

This isn’t to say, Georgopoulos explains, that ZEBRA is like a DJ set, just that this freedom was a “working model,” though of course it’s also something that’s been baked into the Arp project all along. As with every record he’s made, it feels like an outlier in his catalog. (Which really means it fits right in, right?) But the unique joy of ZEBRA is that it also retains that conceptual surprise on a song-to-song basis too. Each fresh sound, each new track offers a that little dopamine hit that comes from encountering something new.

Listen to “Fluorescences” up above and check out the art for ZEBRA below. It’s available to pre-order now in advance of its June 22 release on Mexican Summer.