Stefan Perkins - "Light Gets Through"

Stefan Perkins creates a beautiful, pointillist narrative fantasy on “Light Gets Through” from the upcoming album Petroleum Fantasy. Patient new age chords ping-pong in the audio field while a busy melody runs riot through the entire composition, making the track come together in a combination between Yoshimura and Nico Muhly. According to the press release, “Stefan Perkins is a musician and artist based in Portland, Oregon, and Petroleum Fantasy, his solo debut, is a process. Or maybe it’s just processed, ingredients reiterated over and over to reveal the pulses and preternatural rhythm of the unrhythmable. From the right angle, the album narrates itself, talks about its own accretion, tells a story from the beginning. 

Or maybe none of this makes sense, in the same way anguish doesn’t, with the same weight trauma can often take up. But this is how Petroleum Fantasy came about anyhow, in processing, as Perkins worked through the kind of personal lows we’ve come to expect from the pandemic—that of isolation, of claustrophobia, of loss. He learned to grieve a ghost of a life, pulling influences like alternate universes, from Vangelis’s pillaging of vast and lovely frontiers, to Oneohtrix Point Never’s scattered and scuffled electronic installations, to John Carpenter’s candied dirges. Each is a guidepost for an album that, in nine tracks, alloys the natural and the faked, the thoughtful and the ecstatic, the ambient and the pop, creating synthesized music that moves inexorably forward without traditional beats and percussion. “