Ardor or Entropy by Nzumbe

Romance feels intrinsically meaningful to us, taking us to frightening, intimate heights that revolutionize our understandings of ourselves and everyone else. However, according to the deeply philosophical electroacoustic music of Ardor or Entropy by Nzumbe, we chronically overestimate the resulting spiritual connection, perhaps even missing an undercurrent of division that develops instead. Every component of this album, every stanza of half-spoken poetry, every deeply textured percussive element, every spatially aware synth tone reaches desperately for sublime beauty, thwarting each other’s reach with the entanglement of their own arms. As we disentangle this awkward mess of trajectories and ambitions, we realize that these arms may not actually aim for the same point at all, each frustrating one another’s progress towards mutually unintelligible ideals of beauty. We’re shocked to see the same wedge emerge with the person we feel so near in our own moment of intimate release, both people transcending, yearning, reaching, but inevitably intensifying their division through their inability to share precisely the same perspective.