Synth EP Review: “The Quiet Expanse” by Toxxic Project
By Karl Magi
Toxxic Project’s “The Quiet Expanse” is a musical passport to serene worlds and drifting moments of peace as the music unfolds. I find myself carried on the musical tides and through the textural beauty of each track.
“Fading Love (Slow Chillwave Version)” opens as smoothly waving synth drifts like skins of seaweed in the ocean. The heavy-hitting underpinnings throb as a distorted voice speaks and intertwining notes glisten with wet light. The heaving beat has a tidal pull as the entire track echoes and a tightly wound pulsation floats in.
Sharp sounds add the clean contrast of white caps on waves while the bubbling notes below have an aquatic, hovering quality. Full-sounding tones move past with serenity, sliding like tendrils of foam onto the beach. Distant synth hovers as the rhythm pounds, and a broadly shifting synth is like a column of blue water flowing past. I’m compelled as the music moves over me in a beautifully luscious motion.
Elevated notes gleam like moonlight seen through deep water and the beat adds shape. A haunting melody unfolds with a graceful drift, as if one is carried on a smooth current. Underneath everything, the massive foundation presses on. Disconnected sounds wander like driftwood and I exhale as silence falls.
Expanding, rough-edged bass moves beneath delicately hovering notes to start “Gravity Flow (Slow Chillwave Version).” The vast underlayer sweeps outward as softly spinning notes intertwine and the rhythm has a serene heartbeat. High synth slides like anti-gravity motion, floating and drifting as if unmoored in open space.
The main melody comes in with all of the tentative fragility of a web of nebular stars lost in the vastness of outer space. As the music unfolds around me, I travel across the galactic vista spreading out with a thousand planets glimmering in the firmament, feeling myself untethered from my mundane reality.
Background notes trickle like tiny, fragile meteorites falling across the surface of a silent planet. A solar wind caresses my ears as flickering tones shine like the endless universe.
Tranquil notes shiver and the synth slips as colossal bass rumbles and a more active melody flies in like a starship, flashing in the light of a strange sun. The beat is solid as radiant notes add the sheen of exotic metals glowing in the soft illumination of a faraway world.
Majesty permeates the music as the main melody returns with gentle caresses while the drumbeat carries solid weight. As the winds sweep past again, bass rumbles and silence falls.
