Review: Michael Hix - Aeon

Synths pour in like sunlight through curtains, illuminating my room with warmth and stillness. Piano notes roll like legs curling and twisting beneath a duvet, still half-asleep, stretching outward into the morning. It’s almost too perfect. Dare I step out into the day and risk colliding with accident and ill fortune, or do I stay here within the pillowed utopia of smiling cadences and semi-slumber? Aeon is the sound of finding tranquillity and framing it; a brief moment of clarity clasped and cherished until it fades.

In order to postpone decay for as long as possible, Hix constructs his music so as to stop time passing. Chord changes tilt the music but take care not to instigate progression or movement. Little looped melodic motifs (often rendered in sparkling droplets of guitar) spin above my head, repeating a single action until it fits me like a woollen glove, while organs puff up on either side – reverent, peaceful – and suspend the sound within a cradle. Voices catch my ears constantly; they swoop past wordlessly and harmonise with eachother by accident, like the angelic inhabitants of a paradise that exists thousands of feet above the ground. The violins of the final track fade out gradually, evaporating and slipping between my fingers. I plummet.