Album Review: Seraphic Light

Behold the ravages of youth.

Those halcyon days first discovering you can record yourself. Become a band from a bedroom. Release your essence, your soul, out into the world.

I cringe at my earliest examples; unmixed, unmastered, unintelligible to anyone but me. Finding cool words I could call tracks that made me feel deeper and more intelligent than I probably was. Convincing myself, and the no one listening, that it was meant to sound that way. That the mud, and grit, and static were meant to be there, they were part of it. They were me.

I feel that’s what we’re hearing with Cool1778%’s Seraphic Light. I hear a young, under-appreciated, misunderstood artist with unbridled imagination and a rich internal world, filled to the brim with creative energy they yearn to spill out into the world. Producing release after release, hoping someone, somewhere will appreciate and praise them.

It isn’t a criticism; it is a rite of passage.

I admit, I was reluctant to embrace this album at first. It’s a genre thing more than anything wrong with Seraphic Light itself. I’m old. I’m a divorced-dad rock kind of guy. But when generative AI platforms can churn out a chart and playlist topping hit in a few simple prompts, these experiments in ingenuity, these learning experiences, this public coming-of-age should be celebrated. Encouraged. Praised.

Here’s someone hunched over a DAW at night twisting and strangling sine and square waves into submission, and those of us that dabbled in FL Studio in the early 2000’s, back when it was still Fruity Loops, know how uncooperative those waves can be. How much work and time goes into painting a self-portrait with sound, in software that actively dislikes you. Celebrate, encourage, praise this person experiencing the joy of releasing what they’ve made. To be eaten by wolves, or worse, completely ignored.

Because if everyone is talking, you will hear no one. If everyone can make and release music, it’s not special any more when you do. Not to the saturated wider audience at least.

I learnt late that music and art don’t have to be a product. It doesn’t even have to be “good”. If you’re making it for your own enjoyment, and enjoy making it, it doesn’t have to fit into the capitalist model the music industry has always followed. It can be a time capsule, like an old photograph. This is who we were at 15. This is what we created with our bare hands. This is where I came from, and this is who I am now. Better.

And I think that’s what Seraphic Light is, or will be, or can be for Cool1778%.

In the great time before, Seraphic Light wouldn’t be released, or rather couldn’t be. Not without some editorial omissions. Stretching to over an hour and a half, it’s a quarter of an hour over the standard maximum length of an audio CD, being up to around 80 minutes. But in this new world with Bandcamp and Distrokid-like services at your fingertips, bypassing the industry is available to everyone, and editing can be a thing of the past. There’s a certain freedom to that. You can be yourself, if you can accept not everyone is gonna understand or appreciate who you are.

And in that, Seraphic Light feels more of an art project than a music release. A concept album of sorts, and like most concept albums, the depth of the concept, the themes and storylines beneath it are only truly knowable by the creator.

There’s some sort of structure to the album. A bell-curve perhaps. A spectrum from light into dark. With Blood In The Snow beginning the cycle with a rising swell of bright sound, and All Beauty Is Gone descending spirally into dark noise. Like an aural representation of a light bulb turning on then off, with the moths dispersing into the silence. The juxtaposition at the cusp of optimistic childhood and the hell that is the adult world. There’s that sort of spiral or cycle feeling within the tracks themselves as well, with the repeating motifs distorting and morphing with each iteration.

As a whole, the music is a mish-mash of droning and oscillating synths, time-stretched textures, digital glitch, and manipulated found sound. Layers of feelings. Nine Inch Nails’ Ghosts if made with the technology and spite of the Broken-era. Lingua Ignota without the distorted vocals.

Certain tracks like Ethereal or Intimate have a beat and some semblance of a verse-chorus-verse structure, with their repeating synth lines slowing and speeding up. The closest to mainstream the album comes. Other moments border on Author & Punisher territory, with the harsh dark textures, such as Cut Me With Your Thorns or the back-end of Phosphorescent Starlight. Then there are other tracks and segues that are more chaotic and Aphex Twin-ish, though without the subversive element that came with releasing whatever that was out into a templated, cookie-cutter world of what can easily be defined as music.

As a collection of soundscapes, the album is less about objective meaning, though subjectively I’m sure it’s dense. To an outsider, it’s more designed to evoke… emotions I assume… if disdain for technology, society, social media, and the over-connectedness to social circles we’re not a part of and don’t belong in can be classed as emotions. It could be an accurate representation of the artist’s internal state. Perhaps there will be an audience out there that hears it and connects instantly. In a world of 8 billion humans, there will be someone that feels the same.

And there is a scene for this. Snails artist-run space and The Stomach, both in Palmerston North, have fostered a scene where anyone can get on stage and twist their knobs for a captive audience. And there have been some locally renowned and lauded acts like Showponi and Synthetic Children come out of that whole rungle scene. Wellington has its niche Works for Loudspeakers experimental scene as well. That’s as far as I’ve travelled and looked, but there will be more.

This music ain’t for everyone, but if they’re lucky then one day the people it is designed for will stumble across Cool1778%. Unless this is just an artist making noise for themselves, in which case, they’ve already found their biggest fan.

You can find Seraphic Light on YouTube and Soundcloud. You can also find it on Spotify, if you’re that way inclined.