Listening/music info: VGMdb
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I saw this album in VGMdb’s new albums feed when it was released, and I promptly ignored it because I had never heard of the artist PAON before. But then a couple of days later R-Man linked it in the #Maj7 Discord, and I instantly entered the Gamer Position and leaned in real close to my computer when he did because he mentioned that Lemm was involved. PAON is a new project of Lemm and French singer-songwriter Pernelle, whom I’m not particularly familiar with though I have listened to one thing she sang a song for before. This isn’t Lemm’s first album-length collab with a non-synthetic vocalist—in 2019 he and lasah released (the pretty nice) Dead-End Apartment—though this is apparently going to be a whole multipart, multimedia thing driven by Pernelle’s worldbuilding:
Following last week’s introduction to the project and its striking visual identity, the five-track release offers a deeper look into PAON’s genre-blending concept of “space jazz,” a fusion of improvisational textures and layered production that serves as the opening chapter in a larger multi-act story exploring the relationship between imagination and reality, where celestial bodies are envisioned as dreams manifested on a cosmic scale.
Lemm’s music has always been genre-blending before in its mixture of romantic orchestra and piano with EDM/IDM, big fusiony harmonies, and progressive structures and rhythms; “artcore” I guess would be the closest single-word descriptor, though I think that’s fairly reductive. His music definitely doesn’t always sound the same—sometimes it’s more orchestra, sometimes it’s more DnB, sometimes it’s more pop, etc.—but it is broadly similar a lot of the time without any major stylistic outliers. Even for this new album, Philosophie du Soi (“philosophy of the self”), you can find plenty of the compositional, textural, and productional pieces here in his past works.
… while it also throws Ar tonelico-ish vocals, more explicit jazz fusion writing, new age-y/world music textures, drone ambient, multipart choral writing, and god knows what else into the blender with some of Lemm’s most aggressive and chaotic compositions to date.
So yeah, in the past we’ve had genre bending, but now we’ve got genre bending.
It’s very theatrical, both in Pernelle’s vocal delivery and range and in how dramatic and narrative the compositions are. Every song here is a voyage of some sort, oftentimes a real bumpy one that’ll knock you around a bunch before you get where you’re going. PAON is self-described as avant-garde but I don’t think the music here is actually excessively weird, though that might just because I listen to hell noises recreationally so my sense of scale is completely shot; the experimentality tends to come more from a proggy “well I guess I’m listening to something completely different now” place rather than stuff like atonal, dissonant nonsense. Some of the aggression in the composition that I mentioned earlier does get a biiiit out there sometimes, though.
This album rules a lot!
Recommended tracks:
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“Métamorphose” has jazz ensemble accompaniment that switches back and forth between mathy fusion and swingy cafe styles
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“Mirage, part. 2 : la zone sous vide” I’m picking for maximum contrast because it’s the most ambient sound design-y piece I’ve heard by Lemm before switching to a choral focus in the second half
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