Phillipe Roberts
As a guest on the Song Exploder podcast in 2015, Angel Deradoorian unpacked “A Beautiful Woman,” the first single from second album The Expanding Flower Planet. She prefaced it with a bit of wisdom on her guiding impulses to songwriting at the time. “The two things that I think are important for accessible music ... are a really strong melodic line for the vocals and a strong beat for the drums,” she said, pausing with a laugh to note that “accessible” was in air quotes.
By those standards, her new EP Eternal Recurrence is as inaccessible as they come. Unless those drums are buried in the mix to the point of invisibility, their polyrhythmic chatter is entirely absent, and while Deradoorian’s voice has lost none of its magnetism, her approach to melody now veers sharply towards the impressionistic. Syllables escape at a glacial pace, stretching and smearing across the canvas with infinite patience. Gone are the disorienting, hocket-style zig-zags bouncing like lightning between your headphones; this is a record of stillness, of meditation, of slow-burn revelation. On Eternal Recurrence, yesterday’s air quotes become a telling piece of foresight. Leaving rigid ideas of accessibility behind, Angel Deradoorian cracks open a new window into her mind. The result is an album that breathes with uninhibited intimacy.
Stirred awake by gentle streams of synthesizer sunlight on “Love Arise,” Deradoorian neatly divides Eternal Recurrence into distinct sonic halves. The first half is a steady ascent. “Love Arise” tumbles out of bed, yawning clipped mantras that build in complexity and awareness. “Return-Transcend” pounds the pavement at a firm pace, basking in the vast expanses of looped vocals pooling around heavy blasts of detuned bass. The trio reaches cruising altitude on “Ausar Temple,” where the irregular chimes of a gong and bowed cymbal play against each other. The addition of field recordings of steadily dripping water gives the track a spacious, haunting serenity.
From here, the trajectory of the album dips towards the ground, trading the luminous textures of the first side for a descent into dusk on “Nia in the Dark.” Written for a friend who struggles with feeling invisible to others, the track is a warm embrace. The arrangement of spare bass guitar and ominous synth chords keeps Deradoorian’s reassurances contained; for all of their open-hearted splendor, lines like “In your soul, in your shadow / Grows the finest of the light,” feels like a flickering candle in the creeping darkness. Despite the increased focused on texture here, Eternal Recurrence never feels cold or detached.
Indeed, these mysterious new surroundings seem closer to the heart than ever. The way her voice breaks ever so slightly only to come roaring back on the lyric “True love is the product of the destruction of oneself” on “Mirrorman,” is a stunning bit of humanity for an album that meanders with ambient patience. Contrast this with “Love Arise,” where “Love is the only thing keeping me alive” and it makes perfect sense that Angel Deradoorian would need to unravel these mysteries with such measured care. Despite a short runtime, Eternal Recurrence is a generous, open-hearted spiritual journey, a confessional lullaby for those weary souls caught between love’s cruel duality.