Review: Eve Maret – Stars Aligned
BANDCAMP.
The album title is perfect. It’s a great aesthetic fit with the dazzle of Eve Maret’s synthesisers, which glitter like thousands of astral lights during her flights of electronic pop and unravel like comet trails during extended ambient passages. It also suggests a very fragile form of unity. The stars align briefly and then drift apart, swept back into the chaos of individual volition. Similarly, the songs on Stars Aligned feel like chance symmetries between arpeggiator pulsations and surges of synth pads; not forced into wholeness, but merely sharing kinship within a single moment in time. Eventually each instrument will float outward and pull the shape apart, resembling the thousands of contradictions that vibrate within us all and signal, so vibrantly, the obliteration from which we originate and to which we return.
As a remix of a non-existent original, opener “Synthesiser Hearts” exemplifies this tenuous notion of the whole. Maret chops the song into stuttering loops and drags it down to half-speed, only briefly letting it run untampered before scrambling the source material yet again, the music’s “true” form rendered as a glint under the layers of biomechanical modification. The same sensation emerges during the 12-minute “H2O”, which finds a palpitating rhythm only to lose it again, with a vocoder acting as a tenuous adhesive binding the sprawling sonics into one. Each track on Stars Aligned rests somewhere upon this spectrum: between panoramic ambient sprawl at one end and concise electro-pop at the other, with the former like the daydreams that release Maret from the bodily rigidity of the latter. It’s remarkable that stomping autonomy anthems like “Do My Thing” – which finds the album at its most lyrically forthright – can share constellation with the meld of arpeggiator and guitar solos on “Impressions”, which slips elusively away from all attempts to pin it down. Therein lies the true vitality of Stars Aligned. One can feel the different facets of Maret’s musical persona being lured to their separate corners of the universe, captured here during a one-in-a-million intersection in their trajectories.
