- PC Music goes pastoral.
- American artist Holly Waxwing was inspired to write The New Pastoral during a journey across the US heartland—fields, farms, country music, small towns. And while Americana probably isn't the first thing that comes to mind when you think of PC Music, it does make a strange sort of sense. Waxwing's work has always focused on tiny, almost cutesy sounds, like squeaks, whirrs, creaks and snippets of voice. His tracks are generally beatless but follow a rhythmic pattern, painting each composition in a dot matrix rather than filling it out completely. Case in point: "Sister Species," whose happy-go-lucky melodic cycles hint at the deconstructed trance of PC Music label-mate Life Sim. It's propulsive but dainty, like listening to an Armin van Buuren track coming out of a hand-cranked music box.
The rest of the tracks are harder to compare, though in their frantic tone changes and jagged rhythms, they resemble a soft kind of IDM. "Meridians" and the title track are full of pianos, plucked strings and voices, set against an antiseptic backdrop that lets you feel every sound's smallness in full. "Softcorners" is the EP's pop moment, curling an R&B vocal into Cheshire cat smiles of melody, while voices pop up here and there on the rest of the tracks, adding an eerie shade of humanity at just the right moments. The most convincing track is the one that hews closest to the record's theme. Closer "Arvensis" could be an '80s Pat Metheny track, evoking ECM records with its rich reverb and midrangey bass, as a slide guitar metes out curlicues of melodythe equivalent of dotting your i's with hearts. It's pretty and just a little silly, conjuring up a vast landscape as much as a snowglobe in miniature, an uncanny kitsch that suits PC Music just fine.
Tracklist01. The New Pastoral
02. Sister Species
03. Softcorners
04. Meridians
05. Milkweed
06. Arvensis