With a return to living in the place that he called home as a child, Brownsville, Texas, John Andrew Paris found that the ecology of his new surroundings, a varied environment that sits between just miles from the Mexican border and a stone’s throw from the coast, was the perfect inspiration for making music.
It has been a few years since his last eponymous long player, and nearly a decade since his debut, but this demonstrates that John, as Paris Music Corp., only makes music when he feels suitably inspired. If only more artists were that selective.
Ecotone, as the name suggests, is the sound of him capturing that diverse and delicious landscape via equally diverse and delicious sounds. And it is a real treat. One of the joys of (largely) instrumental music, especially that in the more dreamscape and ambient realms, is that with the absence of lyrics, it is the music that does the talking. And even talking is not quite the right word, the album often feels as if it is trying to make contact via the senses, via mood and feeling, through less tangible and less obvious methods of communication.
And even within this idea of music made to reflect the natural world around him, PMC has created a compelling and varied set of tracks. If “Night Pool” is a wonderful sonic drift that seems to pulse and shimmer delicately under its own momentum, then in contrast, “No Soy AI” runs on skittering digital grooves. It also features a rare use of vocals, with RayPerez warning us of the consequences of our headlong rush to embrace technology, especially when it runs unchecked like AI.
“Wetlands” echoes with that Vangelisian vibe of beat and beauty, groove and grace; underlying tension hidden in drifting atmospheres, and “Rituals” is a heady blend of futuristic sonics on the cusp of rebelling against conventional music structures —hypnotic, repetitive, yet often feeling slightly off-kilter.
Music should reflect the world around it, and here, Paris Music Corp. does precisely that, not just the vistas and natural wonder that lie around the place that he now calls home, but also that of society and the wider world that we call home.
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