Canny and time-bending, composer/producer and artist Alexis Georgopoulos sculpts angularities into fresh, alluring shapes, expanding and contracting song form into brain-teasing sound design. His forthcoming album New Pleasures is his most experimental, yet most alluringly accessible, work to date – a deconstructed take on high-definition pop, avant-garde, and dance music forms. 

Drawing on the promise of futurism, New Pleasures reflects the slipperiness of time, the multidirectional, non-linearity of memory; how our minds shift millisecond to millisecond from past to present to future and back again.

Of his slinky new single “Eniko”, Georgopoulos notes, “Our lived experience of time isn’t linear. The chronology is scrambled. We’re not products, ever-moving forward – model after model. Time folds in on itself, all tenses present, piling up. The past and future are always present.”

“On the surface Eniko is the name of a woman I met in Hungary. And the way one’s imagination can be inspired by something as simple as a name. I was working on the song when New York was empty. Things felt especially Sci Fi and in that long, horizontal stretch of time, I just went deeper into that state of mind. Riding my bike around the empty city, moving through the grid, among buildings, commerce, clubs — some imposing, some offering refuge. Or the memory of that. So much metal, glass, concrete, very few signs of life, just these towering relics of the 20th century everywhere. I was missing shared social spaces, missing friends and the novelty of strangers and thinking about discotheques that look like factories and and factories that look like discotheques and so tried make something that felt cinematic, evocative of mystery and desire. Spencer (Murphy of Onyx Collective) nailed the tone and the snakyness of the bass line. Eniko is, I suppose, a kind of ode to these places of exchange.”

New Pleasures is the second chapter in Arp’s ZEBRA trilogy and advances the narrative begun with 2018’s acclaimed ZEBRA. Now, he drops us deep into the grid of the city. New Pleasures fast-forwards a few centuries, locating listeners in a post-industrial Sprawl (to borrow an expression from William Gibson’s Neuromancer) of concrete and glass, imbuing the album with the flinty glow of commerce, the sleek rhythms of industrialization, and the cool finesse of brutalism.

Photo Courtesy: Kelly Jeffrey