lightness prefers to let their music do the speaking for them. when i asked for more information about their new album, aphid nest, they reiterated the small bit of prose from the solo project’s bandcamp page. while it’s not something that i normally do, i decided to give you the entirety of that text below, because i found it so captivating:
Aphid Nest is an album about the end of the world.
A series of patterns and sounds intended to curse those who seek to transform the only world we could ever call home into something uninhabitable. A curse to every cog a fascist machinery.
Written and recorded by one person in a bedroom, a basement, and a barn over the course of four years.
All shouting and whispering. Joyous and hopeless. Celebratory and desperate.
It’s done now
Thank you
and that’s it. lightness doesn’t even provide formal lyric transcripts, but rather, a single line representing an ambiguous feeling for each song. there’s no names, no specifics. and hey, as a dog that tries to keep his identity a secret, i can dig the shroud of mystery. i get it. but this blanket of anonymity provides something extra to lightness’s music: a sense of ambiguity that allows you to project your own ideas onto who is making this music and how. i have an idea — a mental image — of what the making of aphid nest was like, and what lightness’s life is like day-to-day, but you know what? i’m not going to share any of that with you because i want you to have your own personal impression, free from pre-existing notion, as well.
tackling the apocalypse with little more than a guitar, a mandolin, and a voice, lightness creates a unique blend of alt-folk emo that feels intensely personal given the grand scope of the record. often quiet and tender, aphid nest tackles the spiritual corruption of the world with equal parts sensitivity and urgency. lightness next quite explains how the world ended besides highlighting the general detachment of the world (or rather, its inhabitants). connections have been severed. it could be nuclear fallout, global warming, religious intervention, or disease. i hear it, while listening to aphid nest, as a little bit of everything. while lightness keeps things hazy at times, one thing is clear: the problem is us. we are, in the grand scheme, just an aphid nest, a tiny, minuscule collection of things bumping into each other.
here are my three favorite moments from aphid nest:
“the moon in my teeth”: while the first two songs are relatively quiet and slow, working their way gradually on the listener, “the moon in my teeth” drops in immediately. surely one of the fastest and most accessible tracks on the album, it feels all the most important given how lightness grabs the listener by the lapels and shouts “the sun / was swallowed up”.
“for the mother of abomination”: and speaking of faster songs, this ode to the Whore of Babylon is a love song gone wicked. the key lyric here? “i don’t believe in anything as beautiful as you.” a certain fascination and interest with a character that has historically been considered corrupted feels like a thesis statement for aphid nest — an album whose heart finds the beauty in the macabre.
“when the sun fell”: i found this to be one of the most dynamic tracks on the album, starting small, working its way to a large crescendo, and then cresting back down into reverb and tape hiss. what stuck with me most from this track was a brief moment, at the song’s height, when a backing vocal can be heard. it’s not an echo, but it sounds like another person entirely. even though aphid nest sounds like a directly personal creation, it was a temporary reminder that even in our most solitary moments of emotion, we aren’t quite alone.
go check out aphid nest on the lightness bandcamp page. it is, at the time of writing, a “name your price” bargain, so give it a listen!
