Shelter Press / France / 2025
Achlys finds Jon Porras working at the intersection of texture, atmosphere, and slow-motion decay, refining his long-standing fusion of organic instrumentation and electronic processing. The album leans heavily into erosion and weight, favoring gradual accumulation over linear development. Guitar, sub-bass, modular synthesis, and processed noise layer like sediment, forming compositions that behave more like shifting weather systems than traditional songs.
Influenced by the textural depth of films such as El Mar La Mar, Porras frames the record around cinematic language—overlapping scenes, blurred edits, and fractured pacing. The result is a series of sonic vignettes marked by crumbling environments, resonant silences, and porous structures that gesture toward both presence and disappearance.
At the album’s core is a tension between form and formlessness. Fingerpicked guitar pieces are written and then re-routed through modular processes that distort or bury their original contours. Isolated fragments are often layered without synchronization, creating intentional dissonance and melodies that surface like half-remembered traces.
From the hazy, memory-soaked tones of “Fields” to the drifting elegy of “Holodiscus” and the shimmering decay of the title track, Achlys stretches time into a blur. Guitar gestures emerge and recede like distant echoes, carrying emotional weight without imposing direction. Pieces such as “Sea Storm” and “Before the Rite” channel the duality of the mountain storms that inspired them—immense low-end churn paired with delicate, unstable detail.
Ultimately, Achlys inhabits a space of shifting thresholds, balancing light and shadow, structure and dissolution. Porras offers no fixed narratives; instead, he presents a cyclical interplay of emergence and erosion, a dense yet spacious sound world where every fragment carries the imprint of transformation.