Album Review: Aporia by Sufjan Stevens

In our new, unprecedented suspended reality, every gesture, every walk outside, every touch of a friend's hand is pregnant with significance. To put it bluntly, humans need comfort, and they've always sought for the answers to lifes great questions in music. But the reality is, searching for answers from anyone - musicians, artists, governmental figures - in a situation that is by definition hard to understand and articulate is futile, so perhaps the best we can hope for is some understanding company.

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In his memoir Let's Go (So We Can Get Back), Jeff Tweedy writes about jamming with his sons, which for him is not just a means of communicating with his kids but his version of tossing the ball back and forth, a casual activity that's also a bonding experience. Sufjan Stevens is a musician with a very different style and perspective than Tweedy, but it just so happens that music is also a key link in the relationship between him and his stepfather, Lowell Brams. Brams shared his love of music with young Sufjan, bought him his first keyboards and recording gear, and co-founded his Asthmatic Kitty label.

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When Sufjan Stevens met his latest collaborator, he was only five years old. Last year, when his stepfather and label cofounder Lowell Brams — yes, that Lowell, now almost 70 years old — announced his retirement from Asthmatic Kitty, the pair got to work on a new musical collaboration, Aporia. The 21-song collection is a New Age record built on the backs of analogue synthesizers and instrumentation contributed by a host of famed musicians including the National's James McAllister, Sunn O)))'s Steve Moore and the Shins' Yuuki Matthews, among others. Though technically not Brams and Stevens' only time recording together, Aporia is their first co-release — and it could likely be their last..

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Is there a class of family member more roundly despised than the stepparent? "Parents are Hallmark-sacrosanct," wrote Maggie Nelson in The Argonauts, yet stepparents are seen as "interlopers, self-servers, poachers, pollutants, and child molesters." Many a fairy tale hinges on the machinations of a wicked stepmother. A long-running horror franchise is called simply The Stepfather, title in red on the posters, oozing blood. To be a stepparent is a thankless task freighted with centuries of cultural baggage; it takes a special sort of person.

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For anyone who has followed Sufjan Stevens' career until now, you'll be used to expecting the unexpected when it comes to new projects. In 2015, after a half-decade in the wilderness, he blessed us with the highly personal instant-classic 'Carrie & Lowell', a collection of folk compositions that documented his childhood through both rose-tinted and icy cold lenses. Previously, he had delivered everything else imaginable, from meditations on a major city transport system (2009's 'The BQE'), a song cycle based around the years of the Chinese alphabet (2001's 'Enjoy Your Rabbit') and two albums that brought to life the various elements of a twenty-fifth of America's United States (2004's 'Michigan' and 2005's 'Illinois'), the latter of which perhaps remains his most widely-popular and celebrated release.

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