Dorks And Losers

Music is an expe­ri­ence. For Anthony Gon­za­lez, his music reflects the expe­ri­ence that no one on this planet could with­out hav­ing fallen asleep. The music Gon­za­lez first started mak­ing was ambi­ent and elec­tronic, and it wasn’t until he saw that pic­ture of the Messier 83 (M83) spi­ral galaxy that it all came together.

It would take many life­times to see whether exis­tence in the M83 galaxy is like his aural per­cep­tion of it. In the sec­ond album as a solo project, M83 sought to return to dream­like music that he sought to make. Dig­i­tal Shades, Vol. 1 is the first col­lec­tion in a hope­fully long series of ambi­ent tracks.

Despite a run­time of almost 36-minutes, Dig­i­tal Shades is any­thing but brisk. Gon­za­lez per­fectly jux­ta­poses each track so that the album blends just the right way. Often times, you’d swear you were lis­ten­ing to a sin­gle 36-minute song.

That’s both pos­i­tive and neg­a­tive. As a whole, the album shouldn’t have so many dif­fer­ent parts that it would feel choppy and uneven. On the other hand, some tracks are only two to three min­utes long, which dimin­ishes the each track’s abil­ity to build and sim­ply exist. This might work well, but with some­thing like “Strong And Wasted” (which runs just under two min­utes) it seems more appro­pri­ate near the end as a sort of swan song but being near the mid­point feels like it just comes and goes. Oddly, the lat­ter point does work like on the ethe­real and some­what pseudo-pagan “Col­or­ing The Void” and the roman­tic, yet poignant “By The Kiss.”

Ambi­ent, serene, or what­ever you want to call it, M83 has cre­ated an enjoy­able lightly-packed assort­ment of heav­enly being. There are moments where the M83 hits the right spot, as in “Sis­ter (Part 1)” and “Sis­ter (Part 2),” but ulti­mately the album ends you leav­ing not want­ing more but just wanting.

[photo via M83]
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Track list:

1. Waves, Waves, Waves
2. Col­or­ing The Void
3. Sis­ter (Part 1)
4. Strong And Wasted
5. My Own Strange Path
6. Danc­ing Moun­tains
7. Sis­ter (Part 2)
8. By The Kiss
9. Space Fer­til­izer
10. The High­est Journey

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