Patrick Belaga – Axis (PAN 167S1)

There are certain expectations attached to video game music. Whether it’s the innovative low-bitrate compositions that accompanied early cartridge-based capers, piped through over-active sound chips directly into millennial memory banks, or the lavish, CD-quality orchestrations that arrived soon after, game music has rapidly evolved into a language crammed with its own distinct grammar. On his second solo album, composer and performer Patrick Belaga uses that vernacular to wrestle himself from the constraints of the humdrum musical narrative. He conceived ‘Solar Calf’ as the soundtrack to his own playable environment, a vivid multi-dimensional space that actively supplants most albums’ expected beginning-to end storyline. Just like an open world game, ‘Solar Calf’ can be navigated by moving from zone to zone: from wide, verdant landscapes to tense, high-contrast interior spaces via the memorable interstitial areas where very little happens, but everything feels as if it’s charged with meaning.

Opener ‘Axis’ prepares listeners with its blocky piano phrases that Belaga underpins with unsettling resonances, growls and ASMR scratches; there’s something going on in the background, but exactly what that might be isn’t revealed.