Blue Rise [Vinyl]

Quicksails’ approach on Blue Rise foregrounds his palette of modular and digital synthesizers, resulting in a strain of music that brims with shimmering textures and lush, layered harmonies. More than a full-on pivot to another style, Quicksails enters into a mode of production that highlights his melodic sensibilities and his ear for sophisticated DAW-based composition. Each track unfolds as a self-contained world replete with fluctuating tiers of fine-grain synth-tones that morph as they stack together into systems of polyrhythmic activity or smear into all-consuming drift. Quicksails lays out a menu of contrasting sentimental spaces and self-contained sonic tableaus, each of which refracts the sun’s light out across new terrains. Blue Rise cements Quicksails not only as a master synthesist and arranger of far-flung sound sources, but as a composer attuned to the time dilating properties and the instantaneous emotional impacts of the zones that he lays out before us.