Spectreview: Photay – On Hold

Photay’s On Hold is a gentle, mollifying trip through “call waiting” samples that might quell your anxieties in the face of uncertainty.

Consider purchasing this album via the link above! All proceeds go directly to the NYC Food Bank in response to COVID-19.

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It may not seem like it, but making ambient music isn’t easy. The line between “ignorable” and “interesting” as dictated by Brian Eno back in the ’70s is a notoriously challenging thing to draw, and more often than not we see works that bear a great deal of beauty but fade too hard into the background. On those terms, New York electronic artist Photay’s second album, the quiescent On Hold, is largely a success.

Comprised almost entirely of tunes and sounds pulled from “call waiting” systems, On Hold bears a strong concept that’s augmented even further by stellar production choices and a general “new age” tranquility. “New age” may have raked over the coals upon its emergence almost half a century ago, but given thats it’s quite literally a new age, we’ve seen the genre evolve into interconnected subgenres like vaporwave and dreamwave. But this record feels classically “new age”, more decisively ambient than electronic (think more Harold Budd than Aphex Twin).

Similar to Bibio’s excellent 2017 foray into ambience, PHANTOM BRICKWORKS, On Hold shudders with static seemingly pulled from another dimension, while overwhelming layers of delay and reverb create an ethereal, almost haunted environment. Amid this, the record rarely rises above a controlled din, but there’s enough dynamic variance to keep the record from sinking into the background. Certain tracks, like the aquatic “Peak Bandwidth” and the relatively bombastic “Peace In The Era of Telecommunication”, rise in bursts and fall into dormancy like clockwork. Others, like “Please Hold,” are more conventionally ambient and loop-based, content to carry one idea to its logical extension. In both cases, the album does what ambient records do best: propose repetition to be its own form of change. 

On Hold singularly projects a murky melancholic beauty, the kind popularized by artists like Liz Harris across last decade. Melancholic beauty, of course, is an aesthetic that’s all too easy to accomplish with the tools available to the average consumer. Nevertheless, the melancholic beauty specific to this record doesn’t feel unearned. While the techniques used to achieve that mood (like tremolo and wet reverb) pop up consistently, each track is just disparate enough to be its own piece. There’s enough going on inside a track like the ice-thin “Holding Pattern,” for instance, that allows it to stick to your brain even on first listen. Pacing, meanwhile, lifts the steadily cresting “How May I Help You?” into a quiet centerpiece of sorts. Though it loses a little steam by its end, On Hold maintains its mood without dissipating into thin air, a key mark of success for ambient albums.

Photay’s decision to release his album ahead of schedule is canny considering the circumstances. One tough part about living through a pandemic is the uncertainty; not even the most informed, accomplished minds have an idea how long it will last, or how much damage it will do moving forward. Uncertainty breeds fear, which then often breeds a spiral of anxiety and depression that’s easy self-sustaining. Antidotally, in the mollifying, ghostly shuffle of On Hold there exists an opportunity to quell our anxieties inside this global holding pattern, if only for a brief moment.

Recommended for speakerphone.