(2022) Time Wharp - Spiro World  


Review:
As the US entered its soft lockdown in March of 2020, Leaving Records took their beloved Los Angeles outdoor shows into the digital realm. The third iteration of the newly adapted series, listen to music safely in your home next to a fern, featured multi-instrumentalist Kaye Loggins performing her swirling kosmische compositions under the name Time Wharp. Her set was masterful, and its entrancing shimmer transcended the remove of live streaming. Surrounded by house plants, Loggins switched between guitar and keys, each running through a pedal or two into her laptop to create a kaleidoscopic, neo-Berlin School sound. She surged through songs with such virtuosity that it rendered the typical snark of an internet live chat speechless. “Whoa, we’ve got a shredder here” is all the peanut gallery could muster. That might be the best description of what it’s like to listen to Spiro World, Loggins’ astounding new album on Leaving. It’s not a record meant for background listening, though it drifts and floats like the most serene ambient music. The songs billow and dissipate as threads of guitar riffs and arpeggios twist and disentangle almost simultaneously. On previous Time Wharp full lengths, Loggins blurred her instruments together, knitting soft synths and chorused guitar into warm quilts of drone. Her two 2021 EPs, however, leaned heavily into a more direct Krautrock sound, combining the motorik drums of Neu! with spiraling, Laurie Speigel-esque synth work. With Spiro World, Loggins finds a mesmerizing middle ground. Using sparse rhythms to gently weigh down the expansive and colorful elements of her arrangements, she executes dense compositions with a wry smile. A lot of Spiro World‘s playfulness comes from how it merges acoustic and electronic instruments. The combination of round sine wave tones and the sharper attacks of woodwinds is recognizable but otherworldly, familiar enough to draw the listener in and alien enough to keep them there. Every track on Spiro World features this sort of soft-focus rhythm. The shaker and rimshot propelling the second half of “No Furniture/Tenagra” brushes up against twisting counter-melodies, while “Delay I” uses a rippling echo to turn an interplay between marimba and synth into a glittering cascade. Though everything seems to float free, each song’s rhythmic center keeps it tethered to the earth like a balloon tied to a chair. Throughout the album, Loggins avoids any kind of rigid structure. It’s easy to tuck Spiro World under the umbrella of kosmische, but that doesn’t encompass the breadth of sound she explores. The drum machine workout of “Lupron” has shades of new jack swing in its jitteriness. The slinking piano of “Tezeta,” though nestled in a buzzing cloud of synth and clarinet, hints at Ethiopian jazz, and the title track moves from dewey New Age into mildly pulsing folktronica. It’s a simultaneous celebration and repudiation of boundaries, an acknowledgment that genres may exist but sound best when allowed to bleed into one another. Kaye Loggins is clearly an immense talent, and Spiro World is a fascinating curatorial trip through her many interests. It’s true—we’ve got a shredder here. — Resident Advisor


   


Track List:
01 - East River Dusk
02 - Lupron
03 - TOTP
04 - Mixo World
05 - No Furniture;Tanagra
06 - Tezeta
07 - Spiro World
08 - Delay I


Media Report:
Genre: alternative folk, electronic
Country: USA
Format: FLAC
Format/Info: Free Lossless Audio Codec, 16-bit PCM
Bit rate mode: Variable
Channel(s): 2 channels
Sampling rate: 44.1 KHz
Bit depth: 16 bits


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