There are few artists who think ambient in such physical terms as Anenon. The Los Angeles-based producer, composer and saxophonist Brian Allen Simon brings together the atmospheric, jazz and field recordings. What matters, though, is the method. These sounds are not constructed mechanically, but shaped by the artist himself through movement and breath. It is precisely this embodied approach that gives them their particular quality – one unmistakably characteristic of Simon.
Under his alias Anenon, he has already received considerable acclaim for Petrol (2016), Tongue (2018) and Moons Melt Milk Light (2023). While the latter was a consciously reduced, purely acoustic retreat, his latest work, Dream Temperature, turns more decisively towards electronics once again.
When the synthesiser begins to breathe
At the centre is a wind synthesiser. Simon plays it like a wind instrument. Breath, pressure and timing determine the shape of the sound, so that synthesiser tones are not programmed but genuinely performed. This way of working lends the music an immediate physicality: the tones feel fragile, mobile and filled with a kind of life of their own. Electronic and acoustic elements interlock, are treated as equals, and are woven into dense yet permeable sound spaces.
Simon interlaces these digitally transformed wind sounds with piano, saxophone and field recordings to create soundscapes that feel almost tangible. Places such as Sardinia, Japan and Los Angeles are suggested through acoustic fragments without ever fully taking shape. Like memories pushing into the present. And between everything, silence – so that the listener’s train of thought may connect the places and the contrasts.
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