Short Reviews [Billy Yfantis - 2020 - Entering the Solar System]

Vasileios (Billy) Yfantis holds two master’s degrees in information technology and is a Ph.D. candidate in the University of West Attica. He has been working on music since the late 1990’s by experimenting with tape mixing and sound design, and this is his second full-length album. If that isn’t enough, he also runs Skylight website and for full disclosure I need to state he has written excellent reviews of my “The Progressive Underground’ books as well as conducting an interview with me. Getting that out the way, I hope anyone who has been following my reviews for the last 30+ years will realise that I never let friendship get in the way of honesty (I had someone once contact me saying he understood where I was coming from with the review and not to worry, we were still mates), and if I thought this was no good I would say so. But the rather unusual thing with this album for me is that I had played it through a few times without realising that the Billy I knew as a writer was also Billy the musician and they were the same person (context is everything). This album comprises a mix of virtual instruments and field recordings, with each track representing the sonic aesthetic perception of each planet while “Landing” is the re-editing of sounds created by InSight’s robotic arm as its camera scanned the surface of Mars. Experimental? Certainly. Krautrock? Possibly. Compelling? Definitely. This is cinematic music which should be on a science fiction classic movie somewhere, although if that were the case then Billy would probably need to extend some of these pieces as half of them are under three minutes in length, not what one normally expects from a one-man album. The music comes in, makes a huge impact, and then it is gone and onto the next one. Highly electronic, with industrial elements, this really is an album which is takes the listener on a sonic and visual exploration of space, with every track being so completely different to the last. The switch between songs is sometimes a little jarring just because it feels like each could have been extended further, but there again each planet in the solar system is very different indeed. Many will know of Billy’s excellent Skylight website, and now is the also time to discover his excellent music.