Trope by Pollypraha

In my latest release on Mystery Circles, Season of Strangers, I deviated from Erik Satie’s notion of “furniture music” and Brian Eno’s concept of “ambient music” by adopting a contrapuntal approach and embracing polyrhythmic complexity. I sought to explore a new vision of ambient music—one that evokes a feeling unlike anything I had experienced before. Although the production process of that album was emotionally intense, it aligned deeply with my artistic credo.

This album, Trope, retains some of the complex ambient elements I explored in Season of Strangers, but it was created in a completely different spirit—one of ease, spontaneity, and joy. I allowed myself to make music without overthinking, and that freedom is reflected throughout the work.

It opens with the title track “Trope,” which I recorded over a decade ago by holding an iPhone app directly to a microphone. It continues with “Water Mirror Garden,” made from field recordings I captured in Kanazawa, Ishikawa, Japan, this past October.

“Surface Tension” and “Topography” were composed using modular synthesizers and a selection of pedals.
The final track, “Heritage,” is a textural collage created from a variety of samples, each bearing its own history.

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1. Trope
A gesture without origin.
This work begins with a repetition that does not repeat—an archetype devoid of exemplar.
The trope is not a metaphor, but a fracture: it opens a fissure in the medium itself, exposing the contingency of form and the latency of meaning.
Sound here is not given—it wavers between presence and pure potentiality.

2. Water Mirror Garden
Reflection is never neutral.
To see oneself in stillness is already to fracture the self through the gaze of another.
This piece enacts the paradox of the mirrored surface: a space where perception becomes recursive and the real recedes into aesthetic abstraction.
The garden is not a place, but a condition: curated, enclosed, and silently overdetermined.

3. Nostalghia
Longing without an object.
Not the desire to return, but the impossibility of locating what has been lost.
Time here is not linear—it pools, stagnates, evaporates.
What remains is the echo of a displaced interiority, a home that was never inhabited, only imagined.

4. Surface Tension
The threshold is fragile.
This track examines the surface—not as a facade, but as a zone of ontological resistance.
Where forces accumulate, repel, and momentarily hold.
It is the membrane between cohesion and collapse, between the audible and the inaudible.

5. Topography
A map with no destination.
The sonic terrain unfolds as a diagram of forces, not locations.
Elevation and depression do not signify geography, but intensities—sonic, affective, structural.
Every contour is a cut; every resonance, a fold.

6. Heritage
Inheritance is never pure.
This piece does not preserve, but disperses—threading fragments of histories into an unstable weave.
To inherit is to misread, to transform the given into the possible.
Texture becomes testimony: fractured, obscured, unresolved.

7. Nowhere (Trope)
The echo of the first track returns—not as repetition, but as residue.
A displaced center, erased but not forgotten.
“Nowhere” is not a negation of place, but the abstraction of all coordinates.
It is the sonic equivalent of the impossible: to arrive at a point that cannot be located.

8. The Inoperative Community
Community without function.
Not bound by purpose, utility, or commonality, but by exposure to finitude.
This composition evokes a mode of being-together that resists identity and teleology.
It is not solidarity through similarity, but co-existence through shared incompletion.

Contemporary Artist, Composer.

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