So, I was scrolling through Twitter, avoiding work today, thinking about some of the albums I wanted to write about, and I came across a video of a Queen of the Night blooming. It was completely captivating! Known as the Epiphyllum oxypetalum, it's a variety of night-blooming cactus that pollinates with the help of bats and other nocturnal creatures, which it attracts by releasing sweet-smelling scents into the air. It has a very delicate, layered, and ornate pattern to its petals that make it look almost like it's from another planet. Surprisingly, they're actually very easy to transplant and grow in your own yard if you live in the right part of the world. Something about watching that magnificent flower bloom caused things to finally click for me and Aaron C Schroeder's debut LP, Entertaining Night Friends. The album is a collection of electronic mood pieces that reflect on various sources of detachment, with each track seeming to grow out of the soil of some thought that might keep one awake at night, almost like an unexpected guest barging in at an inopportune stage in the evening and demanding your full attention just as your about to drift off to slumberland (hence the name). I'm mostly familiar with Aaron's work from albums that he's produced for Seatle-local indie artists like Wimps and Zebra Hunt, and I really liked his work on Danny Denial's fuck danny denial (which I covered for a Juneteenth recommendations list a few years back for a magazine). Sonically, this is a very minimalist album, with Aason seemingly picking up stripped-back, melodic threads and distortion loops inspired by Sonic Youth or New Order ditties, and maximizing the obfuscated linear floss of their prospective geometries with the aid of some starkly tuned robo-beats and swarthy, synth-layered atmospherics. It's haunting, but only in the manner that you could say that your own thoughts haunt your head- a kind of bedeviling, simple intimacy that you can't live without. These are short, fleeting tracks too, often sticking around only long enough to make an impression before folding back up and disappearing behind the verdure of a dream-like foliage- just like the Queen of the Night.
* In March I'm supposed to be writing a fresh album review inspired by a different color every day, but I'm cheating this time because the review was actually inspired by a flower. To get back on track, I selected orchid (the color) because it felt appropriate given the throughline of logic that produced this review.
