Brian Weza - Fizzles

 Released: November 21

The first solo album from composer Brian Weza, Fizzles is by its nature and sound a deeply reflective and meditative album. Borrowing inspiration from those cheap new age tapes that littered bargain stores across the country, Weza takes his personally cultivated collection of atmospheric tape loops and creates a series of slow moving pastiches that evoke feelings of serenity, contemplation, and peace. It opens up with “Sensurround,” which stands out as one of the more ethereal sounding pieces on the album and then moves into a more directly meditative piece titled “The Way Out Is In.” This second piece is where things start to take an interesting turn as the slowly evolving bits of tonal percussion emanate a certain spiritual element, allowing the listener a moment to gather thoughts and process them while the soft tones carry on. It is at this point were Weza’s ethos of actively engaging with the media outside of our anxiety inducing blue-hued screens really takes shape. 

If the first couple of tracks were meant to take our focus away from the anxieties of our world, the next several bring those concepts back into focus in a non-intrusive way. The faint echoes of “Stimulus-Response” and the mild tension of “Pseudo Self Exhaustion” bring to light the way in which we respond, the way we avoid trying to process what we are going through in favor of the next piece of stimuli. “Private Silence” takes us back into that reflective state with its droning textures and echoey ping pongs that reverberate and envelope. As the album comes to a close, we are sucked back into a peaceful contemplative drone on “Positive Disintegration” which hearkens back to the opening track with deep ethereal drones and sparse soundscapes of tonal bliss. 

Fizzles is an album that does double duty here. For one, it takes the form of a blissfully ambient album, one that transports the listener to a sort of blank space in which thoughts are allowed to wander. But secondly, it serves as a commentary on the world we find ourselves in. A world of constant overstimulation and worry that we literally and metaphorically carry with us every day. Fizzles becomes through its sound and its presentation, both an escape from and a confrontation of that world.