Alpharay

Alpharay - Insolar

Electronic musician Alpharay (Andrew Ferren) recently released his first album, “Insolar” on November 11, 2011. The album offers up a mature and fresh take on electronic music composition, improvisation, and genre.  Having been a musician, composer and improviser for 20 years, Ferren fuses his influences within jazz, rock, soul, funk, classical, and electronic music into a collage of composition, loops and improvised space.  With the use of effects, found sounds and field recordings, his saxophone and flute enter the electronic landscape allowing the music to breathe, expand and contract. In this way Alpharay offers his solution to one of the major dilemmas of electronic music: How can music made on computers and machines achieve the vital energy and sensitivity of live instrumental music? 
The opening track “Symbology” immediately and directly confronts this issue by giving Ferren's performance on saxophone as much room as it needs to intertwine with and assert itself in the enveloping electronic environment.  The album’s second track, “Ingrid,” underscores the influences of early millennium electronic musicians who confronted the previous dilemma, such as Squarepusher.  The songs “Serendipity” and “Aves Apotheosis” demonstrate Alpharay's interest in a purely electronic theme, featuring his capability on synthesizers and programming. 
Insolar takes you on a musical journey and though each track is complete on its own, really shines when listened in its entirety.  Alpharay's unique perspective of the interconnectedness of sound and form can be seen in the album’s conclusion and perhaps finest piece, “Remember The Cloud Dragon.”  This song is a culmination of ideas expressed throughout the album in featuring a whimsical flute with a raga beat, found sounds and various compositional techniques such as mode mixture and micro-tonality.
Within Insolar one hear's many voices from the past speaking alone and with one another.  Even with the occasional musical tribute to influences as wide ranging as John Coltrane to Autechre, Alpharay maintains a distinctive voice.  His style doesn’t originate from prescribed formula. Rather, he bases his decisions on instinct, where abilities as composer and performer are matched with intuition and engineering. The listener can take on the intellectual challenge of the music’s architecture or just as easily sit back and enjoy the ride. - Jesse Acker-Johnson