{"id":41591,"date":"2009-07-10T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2009-07-10T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/reviews\/exalted-headband\/"},"modified":"2026-07-25T07:31:31","modified_gmt":"2026-07-25T07:31:31","slug":"exalted-headband","status":"publish","type":"review","link":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/reviews\/exalted-headband\/","title":{"rendered":"Exalted Headband"},"content":{"rendered":"

Commuting is an activity I\u2019ve always used as an opportunity to connect with music.\u00a0 The character of the connections has been a little different ever since I started working in a different city from the one I live in, though, as my commute has varied between a two-minute walk and a three-hour drive, depending on the day of the week.<\/p>\n

This morning, as it happens, I got up at 4:45 am and was on the road by 5:30 listening to Kowtow Popof\u2019s Exalted Headband<\/i>.\u00a0 I\u2019ve listened to plenty of instrumental music in my time, and reviewed plenty of it for the Vault, and the question I always ask myself about instrumental work is, what\u2019s unique about this?\u00a0 And what\u2019s happened this morning is that I\u2019ve had a great combination of a unique look and feel to the environment I\u2019m observing and unique music matched to it — and the match really works.\u00a0 The landscape is dead landscape in the process of coming alive, flat freeway running straight through farmland, as quiet and still as you can imagine with the sun just starting to peek over the horizon to my left, bringing the land to life.\u00a0 The sun hits the green and it lights up; lines of trucks doze on the shoulder of the exit ramps, preparing to rise and hit the road again soon.<\/p>\n

The music that\u2019s washing over this scene is rich, rather spooky and quietly expansive, with a lot of piano and acoustic guitar over an all-electronic rhythm section.\u00a0 It\u2019s an interesting meld of organic and airy electronic that often sounds a little otherworldly; it could form the soundtrack to a slightly surreal art film, especially cuts like \u201cSwimming Downhill\u201d and \u201cFractal Dust.\u201d\u00a0 The latter would logically roll under a dream sequence, gentle piano chords chiming away with softly looming synthesizer washes in the background.\u00a0 Meanwhile I\u2019m traveling a little too fast through this half-lit world that\u2019s growing brighter mile by mile, the music the perfect soundtrack for my journey, encouraging a light trance, but with enough changes and energy in the faster songs to keep the neurons firing.\u00a0 Tunes like \u201cKairos \u201877\u201d might be intoxicatingly dreamy, but they won\u2019t put you to sleep.<\/p>\n

Looking back at the review I wrote of Popof\u2019s End Of Greatness<\/i><\/a> a couple of years back, I see I\u2019ve experienced this dizzy feeling before.\u00a0 As I said at the time, his vocal songs can be interesting listening, but the instrumentals were the best things on the album; there\u2019s just something hypnotic and fascinating about the sounds that he puts together.\u00a0 I do think a lot of it has to do with the juxtaposition and balance of acoustic and electronic; Popof chooses electronic sounds that have some life to them and don\u2019t sound dead or robotic, and then adds the organic to give his music that extra light and spark.\u00a0 <\/p>\n

\u201cRun To Daylight\u201d has a nice electric guitar melody with acoustic rhythm guitar and repeating synth figures underneath.\u00a0 There\u2019s a lot of moving parts, but on one level, it doesn\u2019t seem that compelling because it just repeats.\u00a0 Ah, but then it varies and evolves and picks up some genuine drive, and then the electric guitar starts to spark and rotate and ascend away from the rest of the song, and what began as a mild, almost predictable principal melody at the beginning becomes the anchor holding this strange, swirling menagerie of sounds together.\u00a0 <\/p>\n

\u201cDeep & Deeper\u201d sounds like So<\/i>-era Peter Gabriel at first.\u00a0\u00a0 There\u2019s actually a little vocal track, but it\u2019s a hypnotist putting someone under, which is perfect, because it\u2019s exactly what the music sounds like.\u00a0 Its slow, swirly washes of sounds are infused with elements you don\u2019t expect: acoustic guitar strums break in suddenly, the organic intruding on the electric, garnished with snippets of an opera singer.\u00a0 You can be forgiven for wanting to tighten your grip on whatever furniture you\u2019re occupying while listening to this one.<\/p>\n

The title track sounds like Popof might have borrowed the melody from a Moody Blues song, but I don\u2019t know which one; it just has that slightly overblown strings-and-brass, \u201cNights In White Satin\u201d feel.\u00a0 \u201cTheme From Lucky Guy\u201d has more of a scary-movie feel to it, as if the title should really be \u201cTheme From Lucky Guy Gets Eaten by Zombies.\u201d\u00a0 By the hypnotic fade of the synth-heavy \u201cRebreather,\u201d I\u2019m lost in the parallel dimension Popof seems to inhabit, and enjoying the ride.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ll be moving to the city I work in later this year and the commute will end.\u00a0 Most of the time I’m sure I won\u2019t miss it, but on mornings like this, sharing my ride with an album as intriguing and captivating and utterly unique as Exalted Headband<\/i>, I wonder if I might.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":29968,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"tags":[],"artist":[7909],"rating":[5613],"class_list":["post-41591","review","type-review","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","artist-kowtow-popof","rating-rating-a-minus"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/41591","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/review"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=41591"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/41591\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":52085,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/41591\/revisions\/52085"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/29968"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=41591"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=41591"},{"taxonomy":"artist","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/artist?post=41591"},{"taxonomy":"rating","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/rating?post=41591"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}