INTERNATIONAL NOP UNDERGROUND (FIRST HALF)
INTERNATIONAL NOP UNDERGROUND (FIRST HALF)
Compilation
Nightcore
Liam Murphy
February 19, 2020
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September 5, 2026
Tracks in this feature
Tracks in this release
In 2021, Parasol released his debut 1800-PARASOL, a MIDI-oriented concept album exploring the sonic and melodic aesthetics of ringtones. Selecting your own ringtone has always been a highly personal endeavour, communicating taste, identity, and sonic sensibility within the brevity of its runtime.
Since this album, Parasol’s music has developed into something far more sprawling, a transition from short-form explorations into expansive suites. It is no surprise, then, that trance music would become the locus of Parasol’s artists development, as the genre has so often concerned itself with the connectivity that arises from emotionally potent melodic ostinati. Five years after 1800-PARASOL, the Eora/Sydney-based musician has returned with End Sky Atlas, a cinematic odyssey that pays homage to the contemporary post-internet trance scene.
End Sky Atlas’s tracklist consists of lengthy buildups and huge payoffs, which will please any trance fan familiar with this structure. Tourniquet demonstrates this well, a track that begins as a formless, ephemeral motif, developing with a pulsating rhythmic propulsion, eventually culminating in a distorted four-on-the-floor club climax. The track bounces its melodiousness between its contrasting parts, as its initial soft pianos morph into resonant, laser-powered synth leads. But what sets this album apart from other sentimental, nostalgia-driven trance albums is Parasol’s ability to take risks.
The First Turn of the Screw, the album’s opening track, unites baroque melodic writing with head-tingling glitches and industrial screeches; the title track is a hazy odyssey that sees rhythmic supersaw stabs melting away into an emotive MIDI string quartet; and just as the audience has acclimated to Parasol’s usual structural tendencies, the rug is pulled when Find, Pts. II & III suddenly transitions into a flanger-soaked internet-shoegaze explosion.
This is an album that understands the value in both extremes, the memorable, shock-value climaxes and the soft, tranquil passages, working in tandem to produce something that transcends its influences. Demanding multiple listens, the release’s last track, the aptly-titled Our Final Shape, is indeed the project’s best distillation of its themes. There is a poignancy in this track’s exploration of alterity, its drunken pitch-bends, logarithmic bouncing delays, and swells of bitcrushed internet-compressed audio degradation. This restlessness brings to mind a sonic world unmoored by any constraint, a limitless plateau of digital connection and audial bliss.
The album, thus, functions as a loving homage to the entire spectrum of the trance genre. In pulling facets from each decade’s stylistic and melodic tropes, and blending them with contemporary cross-genre influences, Parasol communicates his thesis statement, questioning where we could take this genre going forward. One such example of developments in the contemporary, post-internet trance scene is the subversion of the trance kick drum. Parasol’s online username is drumlesstrance and his internet brand is centred on memes around the concept of building trance music without relying on a kick drum. While End Sky Atlas does, for the first time in Parasol’s musical career, contain occasional kick drum sections, Parasol is meticulous in its application, instead building up tracks through the development of melodic material and textural synthesis.
End Sky Atlas also functions as a dedicated love letter to Parasol’s peers in the contemporary post-internet trance scene. Boasting collaborations with TUNA DISPLAY, plastic pet, s7n, Lorenzi, Himera and Azrel, the post-trance multiverse is united under one umbrella.
Just as with his last album’s evocations of ringtones as a medium for connection, End Sky Atlas reads as deeply personal, even more so with its multiple collaborators. In addition, Katie Dey also lends her songwriting and vocals on Predictive Heart, a kaleidoscopic emotional peak for the album. With mastering by Angel Marcloid (also known as Fire-Toolz), the album is dynamic and punchy, with pristine highs and room-shaking lows. In times of algorithmic violence and online unrest, this album fixates on the beauty that stems from digital communication, understanding and friendship.
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