NEXCYIA - Endless Path of Memory

A Closer Listen

How does sound evoke or explore the experience of otherness or modern anxiety? Put another way, how does music that explores those themes sound? Endless Path of Memory, the inaugural solo project by Adam Dove who releases music under the name NEXCYIA, which claims to explore both states, offers one answer.

All the familiar trademarks of synthetic sound are here: scratching and scraping synthesizers share space with streaky and velvety textures. Ambient droning dominates some tracks, violent sawing and noise others. Sound pulsates and phases across the stereo field. There are rapture-inducing soars and cold, mournful descents into silence.

More recognizably acoustic timbres surface at times, most notably in the first few minutes of “My Eyes Looked Dull and Sunken,” a collaboration with fellow sound artist Racine. Keys open the track before giving way to a  melancholy semblance of a melody submerged beneath other indiscernible but haptic sounds.

As album notes put it, Endless Path explores the line between reality and illusion, something mirrored in the difficulty listeners will have in identifying the sources of Dove’s diverse sonic palate. But identification isn’t the point. In fact, as I noted at the beginning of this review, on Endless Path Dove quite explicitly claims to be exploring its opposite. One answer to the question posed earlier then, is that the sound of otherness might emerge through the way in which music like this rejects melody or even rhythm’s invitation to identification or entrainment, in favor of an immersion in sonic texture.

Across the album’s tracks Dove explores how qualities such as texture and form alone can be marshaled to evoke if not specific places or atmospheres, ones that are no less palpable in their vagueness. The creaking and scraping of “Tales” sounds like a haunted house. The whispering, whistling tones of “Vanity Mirror” more readily bring to mind an outdoor space, perhaps a misty wooded glen.

Despite the lack of melody and rhythm on the album, the compositions are too active to feel like mere soundscapes. The wash of sound on the album overwhelms the listener.  His tracks summon and evoke but ultimately remain ungrounded.

Dove’s sound recalls that of Tim Hecker, a master of deriving deep, complex emotions from layers of texture and the painstaking synthesis of acoustic instruments and samples. If Endless Path does not succeed in articulating as clear of a statement as Hecker’s albums often do, Dove still reveals himself to be a confident sculptor of sound and a master of texture. The album is a journey, a sometimes crowded space, but a space to get lost in nevertheless. (Jennifer Smart)