Album Review: Paradigm Drift by Michael Vignola

Michael Vignola is an American composer who has had a long career scoring films and television shows. His music is a unique take on ambient minimalism and on his latest album, Paradigm Drift, he explores the spacier side of synthwave. The album will be released on August 12, 2019. As a whole, Paradigm Drift takes listeners on a journey through the swirling arms of galaxies, into dense clouds of star stuff and across the black emptiness of outer space.

Paradigm Drift combines more delicate and crystalline passages with an underlying sense of foreboding and darkness. There are more ambient moments and moments where there’s a sense of a spacecraft rushing through deep space, past great star fields and nebulae. There’s a sense of growing hope in some of the tracks and in others that hope dissolves into an altogether darker and more uncomfortable sensation.

The title track exemplifies the spacesynth nature of the album. It starts out with gentle, warm washes of synth that soar over a driving drum beat. Underneath the initial warmth, a quality of foreboding begins to creep into the music. I got the feeling of being a passenger on an intergalactic spacecraft winging its way past great stellar structures, rushing through the void of space. At first there’s excitement, but it begins to melt into a kind of dread by the end of the track.

Timelapse, the second track, begins with a deep droning bass and surrounds it with a tapestry of echoing, drifting sound. The oscillating, flickering melody comes in and floats above that sonic tapestry. In my mind, it created a vivid image of watching an object orbiting through the emptiness of space, especially when the drums kick in and add a propulsive quality to the music.

On Disappearing, Vignola weaves a delicate melody over and through a backdrop of synth sounds and indistinct voices that murmur softly. He has a real facility when it comes to creating uplifting melodies that are still shot through with a sense of melancholy. For me, this track conjures up thoughts about how our lives are, whether we want them to be or not, in the process of disappearing.

Michael Vignola is at his most minimalist on Bending Gravity. The dark cello scraping that starts the track is followed by a soundscape that, with only a few basic elements, manages to convey the airless darkness and unimaginable emptiness of space. I was struck by the way in which so few elements combined to create such richness.

Terminal One does indeed conjure up the image of a spacecraft moving towards its final terminal. The beat that comes in propels the whole track forward and the sounds of the synth lines that move throughout it start off gently but open out into something far grander. The overall impression of movement and energy is maintained and keeps the track pushing to its conclusion.

The repetitive synth arpeggio in the background of Falling to Zero floats over an expansive space. The sound of a computer-like “bleep” begins and then more synths sweep in over the top. It is like a satellite transmitting a signal as it orbits. There’s a gentleness to this track but underneath there’s that same sense of a rising darkness that permeates many of the tracks here. The contrast of this shimmering soundscape soaring over terrible depths again conjures up powerful images of outer space.

The sound at the start of Looper seems to be traveling out across a vast distance. Slowly a drone begins to rise underneath these echoing sounds and continues to grow in intensity, becoming more and more prevalent. It’s a heavy, dark noise. Slowly a gentle, wavering line of bell-like tones starts to emerge and then dissipates again. When it returns, it begins to paint a crystalline soundscape over the darkness that underpins it.

For those who are seeking prototypical synthwave melodies and beats, Paradigm Drift will prove unsatisfying. However, when it comes to pushing the genre forward (as the best proponents of any genre always do) Michael Vignola has succeeded. Vignola manages to weave a synth tapestry full of depth and nuance. The tracks on with drums on them have a propulsive energy and there are truly dark moments here that add a palpable sense of our insignificance in the cosmos. When you add these new elements to his delicate brand of minimalism, the end result is a compelling voyage through space and across time.