The new release by the Peruvian producer is an album with an uplifting vibe, but it is far from being one-dimensional. As with his previous work, there are still flourishes of post-rock and shoegaze influences, but they’re not as overly obvious now.
In 1928, an elusive piece of literature was written, only for it to be manically torn apart by the author four years later on a depression-induced breakdown, further increasing the air of mystery that it had been generating since its inception. The unpublished piece, a poem composed by peruvian writer Martín Adán which bared the title “Aloysius Acker”, had been puzzling his contemporaries as nobody seemed to understand whom the author was referring to or the real meaning behind every stanza. Only one thing was clear enough: this character -Aloysius Acker- was the source of some extreme emotions in Martín.
Several decades later, Aloysius Acker became the aptly chosen moniker by José A. Rodríguez, a Peruvian producer that started fusing electronic beats with vibrating Cocteau Twins-style guitars and then putting everything behind a translucent veil of harsh textures. His pieces feel like trying to figure out what lies behind frozen glass; you can see movement and certain shades, but, overall, the silhouettes are eerily distorted. This album further expands on this feeling, but this time, it goes beyond the fact that he’s burying everything underneath dense layers of static: José is blurring the lines between his influences now, thus creating a more cohesive album in which we can start noticing the development of a more recognizable style; the more distorted the image is, the closer he gets to achieve this.
De arcana celeste is, for the most part, an album with an uplifting vibe, but it is far from being too wholesome and one-dimensional; each piece has a distinctive nature due to the wide stylistic and emotional range that is displayed all throughout. On a technical level, acoustic instruments can be heard with their timbres unaltered (it may be slightly enhanced by the use of delay and reverb, but you can still tell an acoustic guitar from a programmed line), there are electric and electronic elements that were heavily processed and modified, such as synthesizers, glitchy textures, as well as guitars drenched in fuzz and delay.
Each and every one of these resources is used in perfect balance with one another: shimmering acoustic guitar arpeggios shine through a dense mist of white noise, luminous ascending scales diminish the ominous presence of heavy and opaque drones, making them feel like dark clouds in the background of an, otherwise, sunny day. Aloysius juxtaposes opposites, but with his deft manipulation, he makes them seem as if they're not that dissimilar.
Even at its most abrasive, with those crushing waves of deafening static desperately hissing on songs like “Strato Nimbus” and “5:00am“, De arcana still retains a glowing and ethereal quality, but that does not mean that it lacks power; if one were to isolate those passages, they would become something that might as well be part of a noise record. This comes to show that Acker doesn't hold anything back when it comes to his influences, but he manages to embed them with his own touch in order to integrate everything into this formula he has been perfecting since his debut in 2017.
As with his previous work, there are still flourishes of post-rock and shoegaze influences, but they’re not as overly obvious now. “Invierno” unfolds like a synthetic version of Slowdive, but the aggressive programmed drumming gives the song a unique feel. “Garúa” has the wholesomeness of a Hammock or Album Leaf piece, and while this may be the most tamed track on the whole album, the amount of background details is enough to keep the listener occupied. In general, De arcana moves in the same directions Bowery Electric did -creating rock songs with an electronic aura- and tracks like “El hábito de levitar” and “Litoral” are primary examples.
José presents a shift in tone and style on the tracks “Un ave en un bosque lejos” and “Catedral” with the former revolving around a very subdued and jazzy chord progression with almost no electronic elements, and the latter finding its strength in a beefy distorted riff that repeats throughout; however, this cut also represents the first dive in the album: it struggles to find any direction and the syncopated drums don’t do anything to enhance or make the song grow. It does give the impression of just being a filler track on an album that was succeeding in making every song feel vital.
Adan’s poem did find some sort of closure at the end. After being partially pieced back together from snippets he had given to his peers throughout his career, they were able to make some sense of what the poem was about and, years later, the identity behind the Aloysius character was allegedly revealed as well. José’s progress as a musician has had a similar route: he started composing by stacking different sounds on top of each other, until he was able to give some sense to those collages he was creating. De arcana is the sound of someone finally finding his way and his identity as an artist.