MARBLED VINYL.
Jon Porras possesses a rare ability to pinpoint the pulse of a soundscape and tease out its emotional core. His work has long thrived on the friction between organic forms and electronic processing, but with Achlys, he moves further toward texture, erosion, and weight. This music is permeated by collapse—not as spectacle, but as a slow process. These pieces don't unfold; they accumulate. Guitar, sub-bass, modular synthesis, and processed noise gather like sediment, layering into compositions that move more like weather systems than traditional songs. The album navigates a succession of fragmented sonic vignettes: disintegrating environments, monumental silences, and real as well as inner landscapes. The structure becomes porous. Each piece suggests both presence and disappearance. Often, multiple pieces were written in isolation and layered without synchronization, so that deliberate dissonances defined the resulting textures. This approach favors drift and friction, with melodies haunting through blurred intervals and creating a tension between memory and distortion. The album opens with "Fields," where faint guitar phrases sink into hollow, resonant tones that sound more remembered than played. At the edges, warmth flickers, filtered and distant, like light pushing through soot. In "Holodiscus," elegiac lines drift above a gentle undercurrent of dissonance, quietly resisting the pull toward collapse. The title track glides between clarity and distortion, transforming harmonic fragments into a shimmering grid of decay.