SAPPHIRE SLOWS

A darker neon-lit return from NNF's far-eastern dream-pop idol "On her first proper full-length album, Tokyo netscape nightingale Sapphire Slows impressively expands on the spider web tone-bank nocturnes of 2011’s True Breath EP, with headier, haunted highs and eerier, elegant depths. Patiently pieced together across all of 2012 (plus change), and inspired by everything from St. Etienne’s plasticine Euro-house, obscured J-pop memories, Blue Bell Knoll and the saddest Section 25 remixes, Allegoria swirls and spirals through ten textural electronic melancholias composed in solitude. The record grows more reflective and insular as it goes on, ebbing from the Casio ghost-dub of “Dry Fruits” and “Third Party” into the fragile sleepwalker techno of “Corekill” and “Fade Out” before dissolving into even more weightless 4 AM pop-ambient Kompakt abstractions like “Break Control” and “Meteor.” An effortless fusion of emotive and exploratory impulses, arranged in a blue-lit rock garden in an invisible apartment in the heart of urban infinity, Allegoria was mastered by Andrew Veres and features “piercing jewelry textile” cover artwork by celebrated Angeleno artisan Natasha Ghosn. As the artist herself puts it, “Darkness no one can enter; only listening to this album lets you into my real world.