What separates the abstract and indirectly symbolic art of the early 20th Century and the late 20th Century? One obvious distinction is the medium. Piccaso was a painter and his work helped explore the dimensions of 2D space. Objects like readymades challenged the definition of a sculpture by breaking them into their components and then elevating them in their recombined form. When I think of abstract art from the later half of that Century though, I'm not struck so much by high art in traditional mediums as art that is suited to the ephemeral. Live renegade theater, interpretative choreography, computer-generated music, and graphic renderings. The significance of vaporwave is that it collapsed some of the dreamer potentials of a PC's abstract aesthetics with mid-Century pop as a synthesis of both in the 2010s. Many artists have built upon this fertile impressionistic plateau since, but I'm particularly enjoying FM Skyline's Illuminations tonight. It is an album that takes this continuity of nonrepresentational art seriously in presenting highly recognizable computer-enabled sounds in a neoclassical format to evoke the sensibilities of conceptual art at the turn of the last Century. It reaches back farther than most vaporwave projects in its inspirations in order to bring its subject closer to the present- intertwining different eras of human achievement as if they coincided spatially and temporally in the process. It's hard not to listen to the album's funky synth melodies and not think of marble stare cases rendered in early CGI- a surrealist and physics-defying setting for an amble through a digital chateau furnished with cubist art. It's also difficult to repress the sensation of your thoughts changing in their dimensions, gradually transforming, and exploring different geometrical patterns as they waltz in flourishing contemplation to the tune of an approximated saxophone's whine or a crystalline guitar solo. The temperature of the tones applied to this music is very colorful and, in fact, glow as if they contain an internal light source, like bioluminescent mushrooms. Illuminations is an album that exists within the heritage of clear precedence but opens up space for interpretations that are consistently revolutionary in their capacity to cease on the past to overturn them in the production of an enlightened future- a palace of possibilities at the acme of abstraction, forever ascending from the digital sands of time.
