fmvee - Wisteria Fade

Ideas of life, death, and the endlessly cyclical nature of these two conditions, loom large on Wisteria Fade, the debut album by Maryland-based artist Matthew J Rogers AKA fmvee. Recording began in spring 2020, and fmvee’s hybrid approach of acoustic and synthetic sounds with human voice captures this unmistakable seasonal shift. But these beguiling compositions, a mix of ambient, mutant jazz, and woozy pop songcraft, channel both the hope and uneasiness of such flux. Together their mass of auditory entanglements yield a strange yet beautiful flower. Having returned to Maryland, fmvee recorded its frogs, insects, and cooing swans while excavating samples saved from his time in LA — friends, street noises, everyday occurrences. These twin elements were transformed into digital instruments, arranged to convey a sound he refers to as both “deathly blissful” and “tearing apart.” On the one hand, Cupid, an uncanny soundscape of chirruping birds, delicate wind chimes, and whirring electronics. On the other, the distorted synth wash of Darling Exile, reflecting both the violence of spring and an acute sense of heartbreak. Importantly, we hear the artist sing for the first time on Wisteria Fade. Throughout the opening track, Nenette, he appears as a ghostly apparition, cloaked in a mist of digital noise, before his voice is pushed to the foreground on World Tendency skirting above collapsing synths and a lurching insistent beat. At times, as on Iso Season Evap, fmvee’s half-sung, half-spoken delivery evokes Robert Wyatt. “I feel far away,” he croons, backed by tremulous piano and gleaming synths — a dream-pop ballad that bristles with a thoroughly modern sense of alienation. Despite the prevalence of nature, Wisteria Fade isn’t straightforwardly pastoral. fmvee’s sounds are too destabilising, his lyrics too personal for such a reading, and together they gently recall Psychic TV’s wyrd industrial psychedelia. At the album’s close, we hear the full extent of this approach. Desiring Fields unites the bucolic and bruising with haunting piano and deep, slippery beat. On After All The Tears, the artist invites us into their universe more intimately than ever. fmvee sings: “A mother and son/ casting longer shadows/ Drinking in the meantime.” Finding inspiration in Yasujiro Ozu’s 1936 film The Only Son, he grapples with human life — what a successful existence looks like, and a keenly felt pressure to conform. fmvee ultimately eschews conventional resolutions, musically or otherwise. “Don’t stop”, he writes in accompanying notes to Wisteria Fade, a fittingly insistent phrase for music that blooms, swells, and contracts as if in its own state of near-constant transformation.