Style: Electronic, Drum & Bass, Psytrance (instrumental)
Recommended for fans of: Shpongle, Ozric Tentacles, King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard, Autechre, Jacob Collier
Country: United Kingdom
Release date: 31 January 2025
Sevish is your favourite music nerd’s favourite music nerd. For about fifteen years, Sevish—given name Sean Archibald—has been creating electronic music of various genres (drum & bass, glitch, atmospheric, jungle, psytrance, hip hop…) but with a twist: xenharmonics.
Connoisseurs of progressive or experimental music are generally familiar with the concept of microtonality, the practice of breaking down the familiar 12-tone scale1 into smaller intervals. Instead of 12 (logarithmically) equally spaced notes from 440Hz to 880Hz, you might have 19, or 31, or 96. Splitting the familiar 12 tones into more tones is “microtonality”, but this is just one aspect of xenharmonics: you might have fewer than 12 tones, or they might be spaced equally, or your scale might not be based on the octave (the 2:1 frequency ratio), or any number of other arrangements. Combine these unusual scales with unusual time signatures and you can get some truly alien music—this is exactly what Archibald has been doing for nearly two decades now.
Sevish‘s latest album, One With The Fractal,2 uses fully electronic instrumentation to explore equal-temperament microtonal scales with 5, 22, 26, and 31 pitches, as well as rational-tuning scales and one based on the golden ratio. The songwriting process for Archibald is one of discovery, rather than one of invention; the liner notes for One With The Fractal read like a scientist’s laboratory journal and the resulting album sounds like a collection of experimental results.3 At times, Archibald himself seems surprised by these results, stating “[t]he whole thing just sounds very alien to me. The world doesn’t have much music that sounds like this.”
One With The Fractal opens on the lively “This Track”, which has an uptempo bass-heavy section that starts the album off on an energetic footing. If you’re a fan of the bouncier numbers, “Soundways” is a jazzy, drum-focused track with a similar intensity and walking riffs that show how disorienting a 26-tone scale can be. “False Awakening” is another heavy track, and the closest this album gets to progressive metal—featuring distorted, simulated guitars, and a minimal 4-note scale. Finally, a warning: do not listen to “Triple Trouble” under the influence—you will have a bad time. Its eerie horn-like effects, throbbing bass, and dissonant chiming will send you to the bad place.
Sevish is best known for their 2017 track “Gleam”, which is catchy and busy and can be appreciated passively, without serious focus. In contrast, One With The Fractal demands your attention. Like a postmodern painting, you must let it marinate in your brain for a while. Archibald doesn’t discuss the “meaning” behind the tracks on this album in the liner notes (preferring to leave their interpretation to the listener), but mentions under “The Dreamer” that “[t]hings were feeling very dreamy that day when I was making it. I guess a lot of my tracks are about dreaming.” One With The Fractal is an album which would fit just as easily onto a bedtime Spotify playlist as it would into a rave; there’s a lot to unpack.
Despite One With The Fractal‘s dizzying breadth of scales and styles, it can be, at times, repetitive. There is a short phrase in “This Track” which sounds like a metal ball bouncing on a metal surface that repeats twice in the first four minutes (fine) and then seventeen more times in the last forty-five seconds (absolutely grating). The next track, “The Dreamer”, starts with about a minute of an intense, churning bassline before moving into a Daft Punk-esque section, with glitchy splashes that sound like a digitized slap bass track; it then moves back into that churning bassline, and stays there for a solid two minutes. This is fine if you’re a fan of trance music, but if you are looking for something more dynamic, this ain’t it.
One With The Fractal is an unusual album; despite its consistent instrumentation, it is far from monolithic in style. It is an ambitious collection of sonic experiments, each of which must be observed, analyzed, and reviewed before any conclusions can be reached. Sevish has done the experimental electronic community a great service in uncovering these results, and we at The Progressive Subway will watch their career with great interest.
Recommended tracks: False Awakening, Soundways, Durationplex
You may also like: Brendan Byrnes, Easley Blackwood, phonon, The Mercury Tree
Final verdict: 7/10
Related links: Bandcamp | Spotify | Official Website
Label: independent
Sevish is:
– Sean Archibald (everything)
- aka. 12-tone equal temperament or 12-TET (aka. 12-ET), aka. 12 equal divisions of the octave (2:1 frequency) or 12-EDO, 12-ED2 ↩︎
- Not to be confused with the Friends episode “The One With The Fractal”, where Joey gets lost in a timeless void of infinite dimensionality. ↩︎
- In fact, the word “experiment” appears multiple times in the liner notes. ↩︎
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