While enjoying an evening with a dear friend in an elegant, bustling pub, my ears were pleasantly titillated with a musical gem that played on the overhead speaker system. Within a few moments our conversation stood at a standstill while we took a brief intermission from our delectable dinner to uncontrollably bob our heads to the gentle pulsating bass and nostalgia-filled 8-bit sounds that emanated from above. Flagging down and inquiring with the nearest waiter revealed that the attention grabbing song was entitled “I-Rock Z: A Hero’s Heroic Outro” by a local Seattle artist dubbed “inner space man” off his album Galapagos. I returned home, gently inebriated, and gave the entirety of the album a listen. 

Galapagos interweaves different elements of genres and musical influences into an immersive experience that auditorily transports your mind to a wide array of different places, spaces, and beyond. On the surface: I found the album a bit hard to classify into a specific genre. Some descriptive tags given by the artist himself include: alternative, ambient, dub, electronica, experimental, folktronica, future, surf, travel and world beat. The interesting thing, for me, is that all of these tags are quite accurate, and actually go quite well together.

The first track on the album, “Air Plants”, has a distinct tropical island feel complete with dub bass riffs and brassy melodies. It is very reminiscent of Manu Chao, and I couldn’t help but swing and sway my shoulders side to side. A very similar feeling was had with the second track, “Ships Passing”, as it begins with a mid-range oscillating synth that quickly melds together with smooth sounding string instruments. While zoning out to this track my mind conjured up past images and feelings of traveling down the Washington coast line; stopping at small towns, sitting on lonesome docks, and staring off into the vast ocean during the summer. I hadn’t really considered an album to live up to a tag of “travel”, but Galapagos does it well.

My favorite track is the final song on the album: “I-Rok Z: A Hero’s Heroic Outro”. I absolutely love how inner space man was able to utilize and intertwine 8-bit sounds. “Two Bells” is a good example of this; as is “Autumn in the Garden”. The only complaint that I have regarding Galapagos, however, resides in the overly-repetitive and seemingly uninspired lyrical ramblings of “Autumn in the Garden”. “You are the apple of my eye” is repeated so many times that it detracts from the well-composed musical nature of the song, leaves me scrambling to skip to the next track.

All in all, this album definitely helped reaffirm my belief that the current state of bedroom producers and electronic music is a sort of musical scrapbooking: where an artist can pull from all influential musical styles to create a sort of rhythmical decoupage. Galapagos does this successfully, and I imagine that I will be gladly listening to this album during many a future road trip with the windows down, and the volume up.

–Kads Baker, music writer, The Monarch Review