Secret Pyramid

Secret Pyramid

A Vanishing Touch

Ba Da Bing!

While possibly not the first ambient record to be inspired by J Dilla’s Donuts, Secret Pyramid’s A Vanishing Touch is in rarified company. The two seem antithetical—with Donuts a now classic collection of short beats compiled together and A Vanishing Touch being a forty-minute suite consisting of fourteen pieces. However, like any genre, ambient music has a lot more going on beneath the surface than might be initially gleaned. From the start, Amir Abbey dropped his usual songwriting process of long contemplation and careful sculpting. “I let the pieces live and breathe, and I spent a lot less time tweaking and editing. Doing this brought an energy and mystery to the music that was missing from what I’ve made in the past.” This allowed the record to come together quickly”, with Abbey working on it nightly after his work day had ended. “Each album is a snapshot of where I am at that point in time. With this album, I have been thinking about shifting memory, how a moment in time does not need to be thought of as endless, but rather part of a cycle. Every beginning is as important and salient as the ending that follows.” Working at home, as he always has, Abbey embeds synths, tape loops and processing, horns, ondes martenot, guitar, bass, and organ within the multi-tiered composition of A Vanishing Touch. Sounds morph, bleed, fade, and permeate with moments where a listener is able to make out what is being played at that moment....

Secret Pyramid

Two Shadows Collide

Ba Da Bing!

Amir Abbey follows up Secret Pyramid’s previous album, Movements of Night, with Two Shadows Collide, an even deeper exploration of the sounds between consciousness and transcendence. Carefully built and fluidly performed, the record expands Abbey’s relationship with modern composition and abstract songcraft. Cosmic awe fuels exploratory immensity, basking in a dreamlike presence. These works move slowly, like shifting and morphing monoliths. Ligeti’s string works, combined with field recordings, inspire “Possession,” while the Badalamenti-esque “In Wind” pays cinematic homage to the Pacific Northwest. The singular ondes Martenot floats and glides through several tracks, including the hazy and beautiful title track. Each song’s main inspiration comes from the notion behind the album title, the intersection and attraction of forces and worlds, clashing of sounds, and the dualities within our lives. Such a meditative release built upon conflict is ironic, but therein lies the perfect way to listen.

Secret Pyramid

The Silent March

Students Of Decay

Originally released in 2011 on cassette by the Canadian micro-imprint Nice-Up International, The Silent March is the precursor to 2013’s Movements of Night and can be viewed as something of a mission statement for Amir Abbey’s skyriding Secret Pyramid project. Critics have compared the Secret Pyramid sound to the more blasted entries in the Popul Vuh catalog and to Flying Saucer Attack’s cherished fuzz devotionals, and indeed Abbey’s reverb-drenched songforms and titanic edifices of drone do feel at times as though they’ve been cut from the same cloth.  Opener “Outside” might be best understood as the soundtrack to slow-motion video footage of a first-person plunge over some impossibly grand waterfall on an endless loop, as tumbling overtones fight for air among turbid plumes of distortion. “Still Return” finds acoustic guitar figures struggling to escape a blinding mist, their resolution finally arriving in the form of the sublime tranquility of the titular track which follows. Abbey weaves themes of birth, death, nostalgia and existential dread into an album as cohesive as it is all-consuming, a spell that seeks to simultaneously welcome and protect against darkness in its many forms.  This edition of The Silent March features an improved mix-down by Abbey and a remaster by James Plotkin to insure maximum transport.

Secret Pyramid

The Silent March / Movements Of Night

Students Of Decay

Students of Decay presents a specially priced double-CD issue of Secret Pyramid’s two albums, The Silent March and Movements of Night.  Originally released in 2011 on cassette by the Canadian micro-imprint Nice-Up International, The Silent March can be viewed as something of a mission statement for Amir Abbey’s skyriding Secret Pyramid project. Critics have compared his sound to the more blasted entries in the Popul Vuh catalog and to Flying Saucer Attack’s cherished fuzz devotionals, and indeed Abbey’s reverb-drenched songforms and titanic edifices of drone do feel at times as though they’ve been cut from the same cloth. Abbey weaves themes of birth, death, nostalgia and existential dread into an album as cohesive as it is all-consuming, a spell that seeks to simultaneously welcome and protect against darkness in its many forms.  2013’s Movements of Night finds Abbey further develop and refine the haunting, faraway sound-world that earned the aforementioned release well-due praise. Deftly navigating the properties of sleep and unconsciousness, Abbey charts a course that is equal parts harrowing and funereal, tranquil and sublime. Juxtaposing the everyday with the obscured, the half-there melodies and arcs of hazy guitar histrionics dissolve into a more familiar, tangible atmosphere in which radiant drones are tethered to a driving bassline. With Movements of Night, Abbey casts his net into the abyss of the unconscious and returns with a potent paean to the dreamworld.

Secret Pyramid

Movements Of Night

Students Of Decay

Secret Pyramid is the solo project of Vancouver-based musician Amir Abbey, whose previous output includes The Silent March cassette (to be reissued on vinyl by Students of Decay in early 2014). Movements of Night finds Abbey further develop and refine the haunting, faraway sound-world that earned the aforementioned release well-due praise. “A Descent” opens the record; its title aptly portends the track’s dirge-like drones and throbbing cycles of low-end. Throughout Movements of Night, Abbey deftly navigates the properties of sleep and unconsciousness, charting a course that is equal parts harrowing and funereal, tranquil and sublime. Juxtaposing the everyday with the obscured, the half-there melodies and arcs of hazy guitar histrionics of “Closer” dissolve into “To Forget,” a track that posits a more familiar, tangible atmosphere in which radiant drones are tethered to a driving bassline, recalling perhaps a lost ’70s Popol Vuh Herzog soundtrack. “Escape” closes the album on a nostalgic note, akin to the feeling of waking from a wondrous dream which one knows one cannot revisit. With Movements of Night, Abbey casts his net into the abyss of the unconscious and returns with a potent paean to the dreamworld.