“I felt like the opportunity to connect with others through music was missing from my life,” shares experimental progressive-rock composer Carlos Argon of his sonic laboratory project, Hidden Beams.
Carlos has released many albums, performed and recorded around the world, but Hidden Beams remains his outlet to channel his boldly adventurous musicality into a format that is broadly resonant. “I feel this way people have better access to the beauty and the healing I am trying to share,” he explains. Hidden Beams shines brightly with its upcoming single, “Animals.”
Signpost influences to the Hidden Beams aesthetic include a melding of the avant-garde and the pop-rock garde. Key artists in this mélange include Syd Barrett, Vladimir Ussachevsky, Henry Threadgill, alongside The Beatles, The Cure, David Bowie, and Jimi Hendrix, among others. Hidden Beams compositions are constructed from found sounds, improvisations, and composed sections. “Regardless of experimentation, the focus is always on creating healing, soothing and, sometimes, jarring songs. These songs serve as windows into confusion and acceptance, realization, and insight,” Carlos notes.
If there is a mission statement for the project it is that Hidden Beams is a metaphor for the invisible forces that shape our lives, these span polarities that drive us such as love and hate, healing and harming, and other’s energies that spur us into light or dip us into darkness.
As we kick off a new year that will hopefully bring some positive news, Glide is excited to premiere Hidden Beams’ new single “Animals,” an action-packed arrangement that cycles through atmospheric and urgent passages with both poise and potency. Within the first notes, the song immediately brings to mind a legendary rock band who had an album of the same name. Carlos isn’t trying to hide these musical references, and besides Pink Floyd you can hear a nod to progressive rock opuses like Genesis’ “The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway.” This particular track is on the shorter side and doesn’t sprawl out in the way many of the classic staples of the style do, but in a short time Carlos is able to seamlessly layer lyrical piano melodic statements, meditative ambient textures, dense orchestrations with stately strings, an explosive dream break, and dreamy vocals. This is theatrical music that finds its songwriter tapping into mysticism and interspersing the song with questions of place, meaning and dreams.
“These sounds and movements in ‘Animals’ feel like a dance with the unknown for me. An adventure with a close friend to other worlds inside and out,” says Carlos.
LISTEN:
“Animals” is due out January 8th.
