Or You Could...Bliss Out v.18 reviews:

- Almost Cool
- Autres Directions
- Chickfactor
- Erasing Clouds
- Fakejazz
- New York Times
- Pitchfork
- Splendid
- Stylus

From Almost Cool:

As the little distributor that could, Darla Records has had a hand in helping spread the good word on tons of great bands that people might not have heard about otherwise. With their Little Darla Has A Treat For You series, they've offered what amounts to a very excellent mix CD every quarter. Like the older brother (or sister) you had (or never had) with the cool record collection and the opinion that you grew to appreciate and trust. Another feather in the cap of the label is their ongoing Bliss Out series, which has let everyone from Piano Magic to AMP and Windy And Carl explore their dreamy sides even more.

As the series title suggests, the majority of the music created for it falls into dreampop, ambient, shoegazer, dronescapes, or some combination of the above. Although this release by Aarktica is no different than that technically, it's one of the better in the series to come along in awhile. At 7 tracks and 40 minutes, it doesn't outstay it's welcome, and actually makes me even more interested to go out and hunt down more material from the group.

The disc opens with the swirling haze of "Aura Lee," which mixes a simple pitter-patter hi-hat and soft waves of guitars into a rolling backdrop for a lovely two-part vocal harmony from Jon De Rosa (the main fellow behind the group) and Lorraine Lelis. It's minimal and wintry in feel, but absolutely gorgeous. "You're Landlocked, My Love" rumbles along with some downright aggressive beat programming that pans quickly from channel to channel while De Rosa adds treated, monotone vocals that even further accentuate the solitude of the track.

While the long, echoed-out "Happy Anyway" may drift a bit too much for some (with sparse guitars and tone pulses pinging into oblivion), it fills in nicely toward the end and help make up for the louder tracks on the disc. Considering it is the Bliss-Out Series, "Nostalgia = Distortion" again turns in some pretty chunky beats, although the soft, warm edges of a pretty guitar melody help to smooth them a bit. "The Hook, The Reel, And The Pull" revisits the same melodic themes of the track in a dreamscape while "Song For A Free Williamsburg" is an ebbing and flowing track that ties many of the elements in the disc together into a long, solid album closer. As mentioned above, in places this release has a bit more kick than what you'd expect from the series, but it's the surprising nature of such that also makes it quite enjoyable. It's fuzzy and dream and despite not being able to completely bliss-out to it, it's definitely blissful.

From Autres Directions:

Repéré chez Ochre ou Rocket Girl, le nom d'artiste emprunté par Jon DeRosa est trompeur : il suggère aussitôt l'ambiant dub de Pan American ou les paysages sonores de Biosphere ; mais l'idée est partiellement fausse. Si son univers est tout autant fait de soundscapes, il est moins souterrain, moins sombre, moins violent. Dans le cadre du Claireaudience Collective de New York, dont il est l'un des membres actifs, Jon a amorcé une série de collaborations live avec le DJ Aaron Spectre, qu'il prolonge ici. Spectre a en effet composé les bases rythmiques de plusieurs titres de ce 18ème volume de la fameuse série Bliss Out de chez Darla. La musique d'Aarktica, polymorphe d'ambiances industrielles et/ou plus aériennes, bénéficie également ici de la présence de Lorraine Lelis, divine sirène de Mahogany (cf. ad radio broadcast special dreampop), pour une introduction aux choeurs somptueux et dignes de Low (Aura Lee). Des nappes cotonneuses et des rythmiques sourdes évoquent une noisy-pop écoutée sous l'eau, une dream pop parfois plus proche du cauchemar que du rêve, les arpèges réverbérés mis en boucle et en sourdine offrant une teinte particulière à l'ensemble, surranée et inquiétante. Et la musique d'Aarktica, qui progressivement occupe l'espace entier, de s'écouter recueilli.

From Chickfactor:

Soft, soothing sounds for baby from spacepop pinup Jon DeRosa. Amidst the Indian harmonium, vini reily-esque delayed guitar, and Jon's own cooing, there are songs - but they drift along seamlessly. The lovely Lorraine of Mahogany adds to the womblike environment of the delectable "Aura Lee." - Gail O'Hara

From Erasing Clouds:

Darla's Bliss-Out series has continually showcased musicians seeking a certain state of ecstasy through music. They're musicians with an awareness of atmosphere, that know how to make music that surrounds you in a sensual way. The 18th installment features Aarktica, a mainly one-man project (of Jon De Rosa) which relies heavily on guitar but here places it in a more synthesized, electronic setting, with beats, whirs and waves. It's a serene mix of minimalism, ambience and melody, spectacularly done. There's a solitary feeling to the album that's both comforting and lonely, like it's both a soundtrack to the loneliest evening ever and a prelude to eternal love. There's also a certain new-wave pop balladeering side, particularly in the songs with vocals, like the gorgeous opener "Aura Lee" and the just-as-gorgeous midway point "Nostalgia = Distortion." If you could imagine that an artistic work of absolute beauty could inspire people to be kinder to each other, that glimpsing the world's full beauty through its people's artistic creations could spur altruism, then this album should be spread around but good. Its humble title conceals some of the prettiest music I can imagine; music that makes me want to carry it around with me, music that makes me feel like I can be a better person. - Dave Heaton

From Fakejazz:

Aarktica's first two main releases, No Solace In Sleep and the Morning One EP, were both amazing soundscape records filled with layers of e-bowed and delayed guitar, harmonium, glockenspiel, and other instruments, carefully orchestrated into fairly amorphous, thick, beautiful swirls and walls of sound. So when I found out that Aarktica, AKA Jon DeRosa (also of Flare and The Dead Leaves Rising), was recording a Bliss Out for Darla Records, I couldn't wait to see how much tryypier he could get. For those unfamiliar with Darla's Bliss Out series, it is generally viewed as an opportunity for bands to "bliss out" their traditional songwriting style and release something that is less focused on the structure and more focused on the atmosphere of songs. However, on Volume 18 of the series, DeRosa has turned the tables, using the series to release his most structured and songy release to date.

On ...Or You Could Just Go Through Your Whole Life And Be Happy Anyway, DeRosa has taken elements from his first two releases and combined them with more solid and sometimes traditional songwriting structures, to both positive and negative effects. "Aura Lee," the first song on the album, is a great example of his songwriting working positively. It is a wonderfully lush, shoegazey pop song that will definitely appeal to fans of Mahogany (and actually features the beautiful vocals of Lorraine Lelis of Mahogany), Slowdive, and Auburn Lull. While it shares some attributes with the aforementioned bands, DeRosa manages to keep the sound fresh and uniquely his own. "A Correspondence in Film" is another great song on the album complimented by a more traditional structure. Using delayed and ebowed guitar, and many other sources, DeRosa creates melodies within the flowing sounds that are as easy to follow along with as they are to drift away on.

"You're Landlocked, My Love" is probably the most noteworthy, though sadly not the only, example of his change or experimenting working to negative effect. Using pummeling beats, bouncing back and forth between speakers, and a monotonous single note drone, DeRosa manages to bore and annoy me within a matter of seconds. And if that wasn't bad enough, the heavily processed vocal melody he sings slightly resembles a more monotonous version of the Christmas song that the Whos down in Whoville sing at the end of The Grinch That Stole Christmas.

Not all the songs on ...Or You Could Just Go Through Your Whole Life And Be Happy Anyway are completely different from his previous releases, though. "Happy Anyway" and "The Hook, The Reel, and The Pull" are wonderfully ambient soundscapes that don't fall too far from his previous releases while still expanding his sound. Though I didn't enjoy where some of his experimentation with different song structures took him, DeRosa should be commended for trying to grow as a songwriter and musician, and I am looking forward to future Aarktica releases, perfecting the balance between soundscape and song. - Tad Fincher, 6/7/02

From The New York Times:

Guitars, voices and electronic pulses are layered together in stately, gradually changing, mostly instrumental songs that could come from a less neurotic version of the Cure. - Jon Pareles

From Pitchfork:

Funny what gets tagged for popular comebacks these days-- post-punk and electro are the two flavors experiencing the strongest resurgence right now. Shoegazers have been pining for a new My Bloody Valentine album for the last ten years, even though the sound has never really gone away. Post-punk and electro come from roughly the same late-70s to early-80s time frame, so maybe shoegazer needs the crit-mandated two-decade span to rally behind a Loveless for the next generation. In the meantime, labels like Clairecords and Darla have been releasing a steady stream of paeans to pop noise. Darla's Bliss Out series, in particular, has been a vehicle for some high-quality excursions in fuzzy ambience.

...Or You Could Just Go Through Your Whole Life and Be Happy Anyway, the eighteenth volume of Bliss Out, is an essential release in the series, and it conjures all the appropriate environments: a wintry atmosphere, snow softly falling, the scene mirrored in the water as you watch from the lakeside hearth of your home. As Aarktica, Jon De Rosa programs melancholy dream-pop infused with layers of strings and shifting electronic beats. He's studied composition at NYU with Kenneth Valitsky, a former student of Stockhausen, and now does graduate work in the psychology of music. De Rosa's structural skills are reflected in these seven tracks, which play out with orchestral swells and symphonic attention to tone, but never come across as ornate or stuffy. The production blurs the elements together, touching on the dullness of the hibernal season, instead of just the glitter of the holidays.

"Aura Lee" builds from thrummed guitars and the pristine whish of a drum machine's hi-hat into one constant, rolling crescendo of timpani rumbling and backing vocals from Mahogany's Lorraine Lelis. De Rosa's got the voice you'd expect, soft and breathy-- somewhere between a sigh and a moan. His lyrics invite intimacy: "In winter time, to keep us warm/ I'll show you how the snow can harbor us from harm/ Trust will grow in blinding cold/ Double footsteps line the path toward growing old." The chorus, "sing to me, Aura Lee," would turn the title into a pun if the song wasn't so transcendent-- the ethereal romanticism is like an alternate-universe twist on "Manic Depression," in which the artist can finally caress and kiss the music.

These surreal moments of aural contact occur throughout: "You're Landlocked, My Love" traps you in a field of constantly shifting beats flickering violently between stereo channels. De Rosa's pulled an impressive trick here, placing what is essentially a folk ballad down amongst the electric mayhem. At the end even his own slow tone poem gets caught in the whirling textures, fading into a foghorn's groan, then cut up and pasted in abrupt, jarring passages. On the other bank, "Happy Again" finds you laid back against the shore and lazily tossing stones into a glassy pond. Each sublime guitar peal ripples outwards, echoing until time lapses, while the ebbing feedback drones on.

After the ambient stretches, De Rosa caps off the record in a more pop direction. "Nostalgia = Distortion" sets up a downtempo groove as De Rosa sings, "I can watch you for hours fishing your skull." You barely notice the transition to its companion piece, "The Hook, the Reel, and the Pull," four minutes of Cure'd reverb. The handclaps and the bell tolling on "Song for a Free Williamsburg" seem absurd at first, but the dance vibe moves even further towards delicious darkwave. De Rosa's vocals melt into different shades as the beats multiply. The progressions in these forty-one minutes remind me of the Flying Saucer Attack songs that Matt Elliott worked on, as well as Amp's organic textures. The consistency of the music here creates a world unto its own. It'll churn in any season, like a snow globe. - Christopher Dare, May 17th, 2002

From Splendid E-zine:

It's tempting, in describing ...or you could just go through your whole life and be happy anyway, to just toss out the word "shoegazer" and be done with it. I'd be selling the album short, but I can't imagine anyone who buys it on the basis of that one-word assessment being all that disappointed.

Jon DeRosa, the human side of Aarktica, has an impeccable musical pedigree: in addition to creating Aarktica's catalog, he records "painfully honest post-pop acoustic ballads" as The Dead Leaves Rising, is an integral member of Flare, and is well-steeped in musical academia. In other words, the odds are good that a lot more thought went into this disc than the last few Slowdive records. While ...or is all about gossamer atmosphere, layered harmonic feedback and brittle, ethereal melodies, there's a distinctly experimental mindset behind the music -- a sort of gentle, organic variant of the IDM aesthetic. You'll hear it most clearly in "You're Landlocked, My Love", a track built of squishy, meaty beats and slithering, resonant vocals. There are also concessions to straightforward pop -- "Nostalgia = Distortion" subtly updates the Chapterhouse sound, while the disc-closing "Song for a Free Williamsburg", bubbling with a schizophrenic torrent of heavily-effected voices, anchors its mix of acoustic and electronic pop with a New Orderesque bass line.

Words aside, ...or is one of those gorgeous, autumnal albums that -- paired with good weather and a lack of pressing obligations -- makes you happy just to be alive. Stick it in the Discman and take a long walk through a deep forest. -- George Zahora, March 22, 2002

From Stylus Magazine:

In what is becoming fast one of the most important series of music in the independent music scene, Darla’s Bliss Out project has yielded some of the finest releases in the careers of Amp, Piano Magic, and the Japancakes. You can now add Aarktica to that list. Not that there was that much to surpass. On No Solace in Sleep, Jon DeRosa (Aarktica’s main architect) produced an ambient album not dissimilar from some of the work of ambient artists such as Stars of the Lid. The album certainly wasn’t a poor work, it just lacked a certain element- an element that is picked up in ...Or You Could Just Go Through Your Whole Life and Be Happy Anyway: humanity.

Here, DeRosa enlists the help of Lorraine Lelis of Mahogany on the opening track and, realistically, it eclipses the entire rest of the album. “Aura Lee” begins with a simple cymbal tapping out a rhythm, but is soon joined by fuzzy guitars laying out a simplistic melodic backdrop. The ostensibly marginal background is augmented by the emergence of both DeRosa’s and Lelis’ vocals, which build from a whisper to a crying moan. Each phoneme sounds as though the greatest sadness has befallen them both. Proving that some of the simplest songs are the best, “Aura Lee” puts a great deal of Slowdive’s earlier material to shame in one drum machine aided swoop.

As said before, however, it’s not the drum machine nor the addition of DJ Aaron Spectre to the proceedings that make …Or You Could such a giant leap from No Solace in quality and in scope. Admittedly, the beats that float between both stereo channels are entrancing and more than DeRosa’s is more than able to evoke melancholy throughout the proceedings with his longer instrumental tracks, but it is the tracks where DeRosa or Lelis appear that have the most depth and intimacy.

The song, “Correspondence in Film” floats by, surely, but with a strong vocal presence it perhaps could have been made all the greater. It is the final song on the disc, “Song for a Free Williamsburg” that makes it clear the success of newly found vocal presence. The song would be little without DeRosa’s digitally processed out laughs and leering unintelligible vocalizing in the middle of the track. Even by this time, when DeRosa’s voice has become little more than an instrument of the composer to use for effect- the humanity remains, in its most distorted state, leaving the listener to pick up the pieces and start the disc over from the beginning. - Todd Burns

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