Though he's more widely known for the easily digestible indie pop of his bands Idle Ray, Failed Flowers, and Saturday Looks Good To Me, Michigan-based artist Fred Thomas has an equally entrenched footing in experimental sounds and abstract instrumental music. His 2020 album Dream Erosion was a collection of languorous synth atmospheres that washed by in soft fragments, sounding beamed in directly from lost memories of a childhood visit to a planetarium. Those Days Are Dust is the second collection of Thomas' synthesizer pieces, this time taking a turn away from the gentle, sleepy glow of its predecessor for an approach that's spare and absorptive.
Where Dream Erosion was made up of fully arranged songs, the process for Those Days Are Dust was different. Usually working with a single synth and a few different analog tape delay units, Thomas recorded experiments with loops and minimal composition daily throughout 2021. This resulted in music with a wintery feel,
skeletal and solitary sounds akin to Hans-Joachim Roedelius' reflective sketches or the loneliest passages of Aphex Twin's Selected Ambient Works catalog. Instead of polished, straightforward presentation, non-musical elements came into greater focus with these new loop-born songs. Tape hiss, white noise, disruptive distortion, and sounds happening within the environment were all tied into the production almost like additional instruments. On one song, a mic was placed directly on a heating vent as it wheezed in the room.
Only a few moments on Those Days Are Dust approach liveliness. One of these, the full-bore "Unfit" is throttled forward by live drums from Chicago's Quin Kirchner (known both for work behind the kit for Ryley Walker, Wild Belle, and countless jazz sessions as well stellar records of his own as a leader) and bass from Hydropark's Jason Lymangrover. There are brief moments of activity like the dub vortex of "Post-Flood Edits" and the fuzzy sputter of "Composition of the Whale," but the album is largely understated and thoughtful. Rather than regress into nostalgia or seek to mold an ideal picture from half-formed memories, these songs reflect on the decay of time passing and the answerless era they were made in. Every rough edge and uncomfortable sound seeks to remind us to always keep moving forward.
