iota by AeTopus

iota, AeTopus’s second release on Spotted Peccary Music, stylistically picks up where his previous album Cup left off, built from twirling arpeggiations, stuttering grooves and subtle traditional flourishes. However, while Cup was drawn from a specific concept, the zen parable of the broken cup, iota takes a broader view. This new work draws inspiration from the interconnectedness of our world, and thus invites the listener to become one with it. iota’s twelve tracks are a projector in the theater of the mind, designed to draw a dormant imagination to the surface and see what image is manifested.

Compositionally, AeTopus again proves himself an off-beat hypnotist, as melodies and loops weave in and out of polyrhythmic percussion to entrancing effect. “Why Not Now” drapes an odd-time groove in crystalline shimmers as plaintive low tones lift the piece into wistfulness. “Sunny” rides a bright bassline through opalescent texture, as airy and light as “Tell_us,” is low. “Tell_us,” named for the Latin word for Earth, quivers with grandeur. Percussion echoes beneath a subterranean drone before a worldbeat-inflected arpeggio dances across their harmony. A polyrhythm emerges: electronic and traditional music styles entwine.

These compositions are designed for a quiet night: let its intricate grooves carry you to unknown places, your mind unspooling images in their wake. During the album’s development, AeTopus conceptualized his ideal listening environment: “I like to imagine myself in a four hundred square foot apartment, within an old brick building. My imagination must expand from a small place, a place of comfortable modesty, into a world filled with foliage, wildlife, and stars in the night sky.”

The message at the core of iota lives in this description: imagination can turn walls into windows, can morph the mundane into majesty, can change even the smallest space into the infinite.

AeTopus is the innovative music project of Bryan Tewell Hughes, a multi-media artist whose music is influenced as much by art, nature and the human experience as it is by a singular idea or moment in his life. The moniker AeTopus suggests time (Ae), while “Topus” loosely means place.