Telepath was the vaporwave project of Ohio's producer Luke Laurila,
who had released Scintillation (2011) when he was only 16.
Between 2013 and 2015 Laurila released a huge amount of music under
a Japanese moniker loosely translated as Telepath.
He also released Japanese-title music as Trinity Infinity in 2015
and as especially as Virtual Dream Plaza in 2015-16.
His best album was probably a collaboration with
London's Hong Kong Express or HKE (David Russo, the founder of
vaporwave's top music label, Dream Catalogue):
Atarashi Hi no Tanjo/ Birth of a New Day (2015),
released under the moniker 2814.
The distorted ambient house of Recovery is misleading.
The album is better introduced by the oneiric placid drones of Distant Lovers, and by
Drifting, aquatic psychedelia of reverbed piano notes intersected by a buzz that sounds like a shamanic voice but morphs into a cosmic radiation.
These appetizers lead to the floating electronic nebulae of Telepathy (10:08).
This kind of suspenseful wallpaper can easily tumble into
conventional melodic Latin-jazz, as it does in Sorrow (9:23),
and in trivial minimalist mini-concertos, such as True Love (7:12),
but the gothic glacial organ dance Shinjuku Golden Street (8:51)
is enough to redeem the album and to lift it one notch above the rest of vaporwave.
Less impressive is the aesthetic manifesto of the album, the
impressionistic pastoral fresco of The Birth of a New Day (13:04)
for strings, sounds of nature and a fast thin beat, that simply repeats
the same leitmotiv for 13 minutes.
Path to Lost Eden (Dream Catalogue, 2015) contains
14 tracks by Nmesh and six by Telepath.
These six rank again among Telepath's best.
The floating drones and humble percussion of Ripples of time recall
the electronic poems of
Robert Rich and
Steve Roach.
Besides the silly catchy dance of
Glowing Eyes, the impressionistic vignettes of
Tokyo Night, and the
eleven-minute neoclassical sonata Suffering Together,
this side is dominated by Telepath's most ambitious composition,
the 22-minute Surface Tension
waves and waves of sweet melodic strings and keyboards.
Russo's career was summarized on the 28-song Aesthetic (2018).
