LA producer Felix Herrera explores the signals from the archaic, the magical, with the mystery of the occult in his music. Operating under the project name SIGILS, Herrera releases the Transverse EP today from Track Number Records, where the sampler-magic-square-pushing gives cinematic readings of seals that reveal a talismanic aura of enlightened electronic musicianship. With a twenty-first century perspective of technology's advancements of digital genre/post-genre developments; the SIGILS sound shares more in common with the schools of archaeology, cultural anthropology, Greek mythology, meditation, paleontology, and Sanskrit surveys. Creating an ambience you can virtually reach out and touch on the following 7 tracks, Herrera accomplishes this from summoning the practices of forgotten studies, while wielding planetary seals and analogically processed glyphs to graph music for unmade films.
Opener “Cygnus” realigns the constellations like environmental immersions of a Vangelis score applied to a film with the old school Orion Pictures logo. The spinning stars sound like planets in orbit on “Equinox” that intersects a celestial sound equator, burning with the gamma rays of a synthesized sun. Keeping the Greek motifs going, Herrera's “Orpheus” samples gothic choir vocals in deep-leveled low frequency realms that carves atmospheric sanctuaries out of drum and bass rhythm sections. Interjecting a moment of meditative pause, “Lotus” gives Transverse a 'yoga' moment where the mind can choose to focus on the blooming and breathing key arrangements or the therapeutic drum patterns to still the being.
“The Seal” continues the film score ambiance, where one track climbs anxious up and down keyboard scales while other synthesized settings create vast aural spaces. And like a good soundtrack composer, Felix hones in on those empty spaces within his all tracks. The following title piece “Transverse” sends sampled string emulations rising upward in the track while gusts of drum machine air cross the choral keyboards in perpendicular intersections.
The closing “Vimana” is full of ancient and electronic Sanskrit wonders that brings to mind everything from flying chariots to the adytum of a Rama temple. Again, Herrera uses keys to create environments of dry sand storms as the track's central dub structured ruins gives accompaniment to excavate mythic mechanical birds lost in the rocky crevices and time wells of worlds we may never understand. But what becomes understood is that Felix's extended player displays not just a cross section between the electronic produced music worlds, but a cross point between the axis of sound sprung imagination and mythologies made new for today's audio anthropology.
SIGILS Transverse EP is available now from Track Number Records and available for free download for a limited time.
