With the brilliant 2013 album
More
,
Alexis Georgopoulos
aka
Arp
switched gears from his more avant-garde early work to a decidedly more traditional sound, channeling the mutant pop wonderment of freaked-out visionaries like
Brian Eno
and
Kevin Ayers
. Surfacing just a year later, EP release
Pulsars e Quasars
offers something of an introductory grab bag of the various styles that
is capable of. The short opening instrumental "Suns" is a noisy improvisational bluster of modular synth and live instruments, but soon melts into the title track, a subdued, pastel-colored slow-burning pop tune that sounds like
Eno
singing over a lost jam from an early
Beach Boys
recording session. This song and "UHF1" follow the same warped pop path as
, while "Chromatiques II" gets into sprawling shoegaze textures and "New Persuasion" employs a barrage of minimal drum machine clacks and meditative synthesizers, instantly evoking the Krautrock push of bands like
Neu!
La Duesseldorf
. ~ Fred Thomas