The Floating Opera is the debut album from US artist BDYWRKS (aka Theo Trump), who embraces static and abstraction as gateways to gorgeous harmonic drift and tactile melodic exploration. Its six chapters offer a transportive world of vaporous swells and fragmented beauty, born from a period of emotional isolation in the artist’s life, when the acts of composition and experimentation became essential therapy. Named in homage to Issey Miyake’s Bodyworks gallery exhibit (1983), they recall, “I was particularly taken with photographs of his mannequins seemingly floating up to the ceiling, and from the start, I wanted to make a sonic mirror of that.” The skillful, cohesive assemblage of disparate elements here is a direct result of an intuitive process, as the artist notes, “I treat each session as a constantly evolving, living thing, and in editing, I consider the possibilities of how much further I can go with spaces and frequencies.” As its many layers intersect and disperse, momentary consonances appear and vanish, while a quivering bed of static, always hovering at the fringes, provides reliable solace.
