Petridisch :: SP-404

A melody surfaces the way a memory returns without managing to make itself recognised.

SP-404 gathers seven recordings by Petridisch, the project of Boston musician Thor Maillet, drawn from releases dated between 2016 and 2025. I Heart Noise publishes it, and the running order proceeds with no regard for chronology: a 2016 version of “The Antagonist” sits beside an excerpt, a cover, a 2018 concert recording unreleased until now. These were materials scattered across labels and formats, cassettes, EPs, files, and finding them on a single carrier produces a practical effect before a critical one, that of a provisional map for a catalogue which, until yesterday, had to be reconstructed by hand.

Among his reference points Maillet names Philip Glass and Mylène Farmer. Set against the music, the pairing explains a good deal. From Glass comes the repetition that holds a piece up from the inside, the arpeggio that shifts by a single degree, enough on its own to change the temperature of the chord; from Farmer, singing understood as presence on a stage, with a taste for the theatrical gesture that electronic music of this kind usually tends to suppress.

What is most interesting here is the range of ways the past is presented. “The Antagonist” returns in its 2016 version. “Malaise Event” appears as an excerpt: it starts from a point inside the original track and develops an entire piece from it, among underwater arpeggios and organs of hauntological temper, entering and leaving at a threshold someone chose, which does not coincide with the original one. “Small Train Song Home”, recorded live in 2018, carries another condition of performance inside it, a room, an audience, someone listening. Three distances from the source work, each measured differently. This is music that moves by semitones, and when the register drops the friction between the notes becomes a muddy growl, sustained for as long as the oscillator holds it.

“Tweks (Part 4)” keeps the theatricality of the synthetic strings: a construction that grows and then knots itself, leaving only an uneasy vocalise, someone still on stage after the scenery has been struck. “L’Infantile”, from Aperitifs, is the lightest and strangest side, a fragment of everyday speech meeting a thin line of song and an accompaniment reduced to a few points of synthetic dilation. The cover of “Departing the Body”, by the New Zealand guitarist Roy Montgomery, brings into the collection a declared debt to a history that runs through the guitar; here the guitar too is treated as an instrument of memory, by way of estranging effects.

A selection this compact asks for something in return. Pieces that on the original records had time to develop, with other pieces around them preparing their entrance, arrive here on their own, and the sequence advances in short, concentrated strokes. In exchange it gains focus: placed side by side, examples as much as nine years apart make a method legible, the continuity between melody and synthetic voice.

Maillet lets the singing lose its words without losing its intention.

Anyone reaching Petridisch through this selection will find in the complete records a wide body of work, one that holds attention and unfolds with the time it is owed. SP-404 remains the door worth entering by.