ALTERED ACUITY

MIRA SNELDER has been an esteemed colleague on ProgArchives on the Eclectic Prog Team for a while now and has displayed a firm knowledge of complex music with some excellent recommendations of bands for inclusion. We are also lucky that MIRA is an excellent musician and composer with four albums out now. This latest ALTERED ACUITY was released in September 2022 and has gone somewhat unnoticed due to the barrage of excellent albums that came out in 2022. I first experienced MIRA's music with the debut "DIaspora" and was pleasantly surprised that MIRA alone crafted a brilliant album's worth of material as the sole instrumentalist and producer.

I have to admit the album cover art isn't very appealing and i was expecting some sort of tribute to cutesy Japanese video game music or something but once i finally got around to checking out this latest release i have to say that the music is not anything that i was expecting at all! Once again MIRA SNELDER handles almost all of the musical duties on this instrumental excursion into vast progressive soundscapes. Sounds heard are derived from electric guitar, classical guitar, analog synthesizer, piano, sequencer, various samples and found objects, FL Studio 20, Audacity, Videopad and Atchafalaya Arcade. Dàzhū makes a guest appearance on erhu and clarinet.

This set of 11 tracks adds up to about 59 minutes of playing time and provides an interesting array of progressive rock compositions experienced in various styles of electronic music dressing. That's right! MIRA adopted the tones, timbres and textures of electronic music styles like IDM, drum & bass and lo-fi hip hop and used all these colorful expressions to decorate fully fueled progressive rock compositions. The results yield something i've never quite heard before. Yeah there are hints of Squarepusher, Aphex Twin, Amon Tobin, Boards of Canada and lo-fi instrumental hip hop acts like Knxwledge that are mixed and melded with the compositional fortitude of classic progressive rock with jagged even jittery moments of spazzed out time signature workouts and other proggy elements.

Fitting well into PA's eclectic prog category, ALTERED ACUITY is a bizarre ride through a sea of electronic sounds crafted in classic prog scores. The music is both easily accessible and simultaneously alienating which makes it bizarrely intriguing to say the least! The musicianship is excellent as MIRA delivers musical motifs like a seasoned classical music at a jazz club and given the unorthodoxies of this bizarre musical chimera, the album takes you through many different moods and stylistic approaches. Ranging from steady groovy beat oriented tracks to highly angular avant-prog ALTERED ACUITY is an excellent example of an independent artist thinking well outside of the box. My kinda musical freakery here! Oh yeah!!!

This will probably be too electronic oriented for many prog traditionalists but this album of intrepid intricacies will definitely appeal to fans of Squarepusher and other jazz-fueled IDM style acts. So many curveballs in this one with hairpin turns and electronic weirdness. While a few tracks like the combo track "Cloistered Recurrence" and "Captain Freeman" may sound a little too synth-poppy in relation to the rest of the album, overall this is an interesting exploration of electronica music in a prog rock context. Fascinating and bold in approach, this is an album that i find quite enjoyable due to its disregard for "normalities" and the outstanding mastery of the instrumentation. A passionate and resolute dedication to higher music appreciation here. Don't let the anime album cover scare you away! The music is excellent.