Album Review: Lifetime of Love by Moon Diagrams

W ith stress, anxiety and memes taking up ever more of our valuable mental real estate, it is little wonder that the visualisations, mantras and brain-tickling sounds offered by mindfulness and ASMR videos have gone mainstream in recent years. This debut solo album from Deerhunter drummer and co-founder Moses Archuleta - created in a period of turmoil and rediscovery, following the breakdown of his marriage - has much the same effect as listening to crackling static or laboriously chewing a grape. In it, he seamlessly moulds techno, samples that float in and out of reach like leaves in a lake, and the odd art-pop flourish into soundscapes that undulate with the sense of powering down.

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"It is all pink candy," Vladimir Nabokov once said of Maxim Gorky's short story Twenty-six Men and a Girl, "with just that amount of soot clinging to it to make it attractive." There's something of a soot-caked candy quality to Lifetime of Love, the debut album of Moon Diagrams: sweet pop melodies gleam out beneath a gauze of grimy noise, muffled like the sounds of the dancefloor heard from the bathroom stall. The effect is certainly attractive. All efforts to reimagine pop music as a lo-fi endeavor--to warp it, flatten it, to smother it in reverb and distortion--exploit the appeal of that contrast, that incongruity of candy and soot.

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Ten years in the making, Lifetime of Love is the debut of Moon Diagrams, a solo project by Deerhunter co-founder and drummer Moses Archuleta. He began tracking it after his post-rock band wrapped up work on 2007's Cryptograms. With an experimental bent that differs significantly from that of his more guitar-centric band, the album incorporates ambient instrumentals, samples, field recordings, and styles like disco and ambient techno.

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