Flipside by Jordan Christoff

Like a rocket forcefully propelling itself into outer space, Jordan Christoff’s newest offering on Phinery wastes no time getting where it’s going. With a rush, the opening track, “слободен,” bursts violently into the exosphere, freed in an instant from the earth’s gravitational tug, already lost in the fullness of an immeasurable cosmos.

This explosion of movement into extended repose is central to “Flipside,” which inverts common ambient tropes of soft-to-loud and sparse-to-dense to great effect. For, when your destination is the cosmic aether, to linger softly at the threshold of motion only serves to prolong subjugation to the weight of the world. Already free of its earthly burden in the first act, Christoff’s ensemble of drone tones and flittering voices can begin to trace the slow drift of weightlessness through space.

Christoff’s journey is not for the faint of heart. There is nothing about the record’s conclusion to suggest a return to Earth is in the cards. Setting foot in this craft is thus a renunciation of everything that came before for a chance to be lost in the vastness of an onward perpetual motion. To drift on the Flipside, Free and Floating through the Heavens…

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