Tianhuojian – Wading in the Afterlife (2022)

A girl who is not aware she crossed over into the afterlife; is life itself but a dream within a dream?

The title’s a misnomer: dream water’s not to be waded through, better rather to drift. Splashing along the lazy river you’re just going roundabout, but if you catch the natural current it’s got an outlet in mind. If the dream’s a reflection and the stream is its source then that’s the direction we’ll drift: beyond. Drink deep from the cosmic microwave background radiation and you’ve got the shimmer of a looking-glass alright: this screen’s glazed with waves. The pool’s got defined walls only until they disappear in the haze; hallucination concealing hallucination offers strange clarity – that’s vaporwave.

But as for those waves that urge their charge forward, where’s their origin, where’s their end? Questions in shadow stalk the light drifter and eventually close on their prey, resulting in growth which brings the changed drifter back to the water’s right course. A will to power is the popular game that comes of that shadow’s long chase, but it’s easy in the dark to confuse for power what’s ultimately a will to peace. Contemplating the ripples, the swimmer’s eased into her surrender. In my beginning is my end; submerge.

Daddy0

“Your long-lost friend taking off their invisibility cloak”

The king of vaporwave has always been an oft-contested throne, but it should come as no great surprise that Luke Laurila’s Telepath title had ownership of this genre’s digital crown for many a year of benevolent and brilliant ambient composition and sample-loaded world-building. His discography is ripe with alternate aliases who all have their own modern classics, with 2814’s Birth of a New Day, Taihe Zhiheng’s Mysterious Lover, and Danpenka Sareta Yuujin’s FragmentedMemories among them, but save for a subtle gasp of meandering synthwave experiments toward the end of 2020, it had been three long and painstaking years since Telepath had released anything at all, much less under his primary pseudonym that possessed the claim to the pinnacle of vaporwave’s virtual royalty.

The silence finally broke at the beginning of April, when the familiar face of Telepath’s signature skewed blurry album artwork and a completely fresh Asia-centric nom de plume made a nonchalant yet significant return to form that had been anticipated for well over thirty months. Now operating under the name of Tianhuojian and taking on a rich purple color palette, the forty-minute comeback venture of Wading in the Afterlife is much more than an exclusively musical affair. Luke Laurila was never one to stray away from the idea of a consistent visual aesthetic, but his post-hiatus work has taken an elegant swan dive into the deepest of delightful eye-pleasing esoterica.

The five smooth psychedelic drone pieces of 涉水来世 have been composed for a short film, which is readily available within the artist’s YouTube channel as a comprehensive tour of Tianhuojian’s grainy glitchy winter wonderland. The pitter-patter of cosmic raindrops pelts each distorted scene of amethyst-shaded aquatic woodland exploration, rising and falling in tension and intensity, and it is clear that the music has been made in reference to the movie and not vice versa. Telepath is back and better than ever, with a project that transcends sound alone.

duncanreviews Apr 16 2022

Wading in the Afterlife_(2022)_Tianhuojian.mkv

General
Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	40 min 4 s
Size: 	396 MiB
Video
Codec: 	h264
Resolution: 	640x480 
Aspect ratio:  	4:3
Frame rate: 	29.970 fps
Bit rate: 	1 248 kb/s
BPP: 	0.136
Audio
#1:  	2.0ch AAC LC @ 132 kb/s

https://nitro.download/view/FCD17B18F2857A4/Wading_in_the_Afterlife_(2022)_Tianhuojian.mkv

Language(s):No dialogue
Subtitles:None