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
Arp 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
More, 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! and
La Düsseldorf. ~ Fred Thomas