Album Review: Pulsars e Quasars [EP] by Arp

There is no obvious narrative arc to trace along the path of Alexis Georgopoulos’s creative output, from his role as a founding member of the San Francisco art-groove ensemble Tussle, to the different shapes that his Arp project has now taken. After establishing an exploratory synth-driven sound with the first Arp releases and then making a melodic about-face with the more direct pop-tones of last year’s MORE, the new Pulsars e Quasars EP neither ditches the new direction nor stays tied to it. Driven as equally by abstraction as by hooks, Pulsars e Quasars does not bury pop underneath noise, it marries the two loosely, and the record holds together well because of that looseness.

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With the brilliant 2013 album More, Alexis Georgopoulos aka Arp switched gears from his more avant-garde early work to a decidedly more traditional sound, channeling the mutant pop wonderment of freaked-out visionaries like Brian Eno and Kevin Ayers. Surfacing just a year later, EP release Pulsars e Quasars offers something of an introductory grab bag of the various styles that Arp is capable of. The short opening instrumental "Suns" is a noisy improvisational bluster of modular synth and live instruments, but soon melts into the title track, a subdued, pastel-colored slow-burning pop tune that sounds like Eno singing over a lost jam from an early Beach Boys recording session.

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Tussle's music frequently resembled electro-funk-as-astronaut ice cream: dehydrated, alkaline, functional but in an abstemious way. As Arp, ex-member Alexis Georgopoulos has retained his old group's basis in krautrock and modular synthesis but has taken it in freer directions, relaxing out of Tussle's parched technicality across a string of increasingly warm, woolly and hard to categorize records. As Arp's first two efforts form a symmetrical pair, so does new EP Pulsars e Quasars with last year's improbable More.

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Having already released two albums of analogue synth compositions, New York bedroom composer Alexis Georgopoulos turned to cosmic pop on last year’s ‘More’. The Moog returns here, but ‘Suns’ – two minutes of busted TV static – is an inscrutable opener. The title-track’s pattering snares and vintage keyboards are a welcome jolt, but Arp saves his best for ‘UHF1’ – coasting towards oblivion on guitar hooks and barrelling drum rolls.

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