For a brief moment, opener Terminal subsumes you in warm, starry-eyed synth arpeggios, and then down the rabbit hole you go – from the keyed up, skyscraping machine love of VHS Sex and Cathode Girls to opuses like Air Cal and Ether Drift that sound like Doogie Howser s idea of the perfect prom song – mathy, forlorn, funky, and mighty in technical ambition. That they re all noticeably cinematic is, of course, by design – Haley envisioned Galactic Melt as a sort of film score – from the mind, chronicling the lift and death of Com Truise, the world s first synthetic robotic astronaut, from his creation and life on earth to his subsequent mission to a newly discovered galaxy called Wave 1. Eventually, Truise becomes one with his newfound cosmos, like Pinocchio becoming a real boy, but in the nether regions of imaginary space. Haley says knowing when and how to complete such an opus was the hardest part of making the record, nevermind all the carefully synth programmed patches on his Sequential Circuits Split-8 or the three years of real life that transpired during its genesis. It s a world unto itself, a sci-fi bildungsroman of sorts, and most importantly, an awesome escape from the corporeal. – Ghostly

• black double vinyl pressing
• plays at 45RPM
• printed insert
• original release year: 2011
• music label: Ghostly International 2023

• reviewed by Von Bee 08 2011