Synth Single Review: “In Search of Synthia” by Anantphenix 83 & Lisa Marie Perkins

by Karl Magi

Anantphenix & Lisa Marie Perkins’ “In Search of Synthia” tells the story of a quest across time and space. The song opens as rain falls and solidly resonating bass pulses, with gossamer bells chiming in a delicately musical pattern. Lisa Marie Perkins’ voice drifts with vivid emotion, rising above the glistening background. The bells ring out with cosmic radiance, and her voice is tender and trembling.

The drums begin to pound as floating tones levitate like stars on the edge of my vision. The steady rhythm moves with luscious bass, while Lisa Marie Perkins’ fragility and vulnerability capture my heart. Illuminating bells flash with meditative light as the bass throbs softly but powerfully. As the vocals hover with ethereal elegance, a synth cries out with hurting, galactic sensations and the piano traces a filigree of delicate notes while Lisa Marie Perkins carries the touching emotional depths through to a close.

As our narrator looks over “black glass horizons,” she floats above the Earth with an engine that hums but barely functions. “Dim stars flicker through the smoke,” while she speaks of Synthia as “a spark in a dream of hope.” She exists across a frequency that’s never been cut off, drifting like a shadow through a digital daze.

Synthia is a flicker in the static, and the storyteller asks her, “Are you a memory or part of the machine?” Synthia is like a secret code, and she wonders, “If I reach you, will you stay or dissolve at the edge of yesterday?” With neither key nor map, only a shimmer, she concludes, “Your name is still written in the code.”