Review
Sky Hundred
Parannoul
The best time travel stories understand time is a finite resource. To hear Parannoul say it himself, “Time passes no matter [if] you’re wandering or not.” The past cannot be changed, and the future might be unending, but the present is what it is, and it is now. It makes sense why stories with limitless realities and unattainable versions of yourself are tangible, and within your reach, are so popular in the uncertain present, but they’re booooring. If there are limitless resources, where are the stakes? What does each version of yourself matter if there’s an infinite supply?
“Sky Hundred,” the epic new full-length from the South Korean one-man wrecking crew Parannoul, is titled after an idea of looking down from the sky, seeing a hundred versions of you existing alongside each other, and wondering “what’s the difference between them and me?” What is the real, tangible value of imagining another you, and why do we catch ourselves doing it so much? It makes me think of video game ghosts, recordings of previous digital lives super-imposed on the present world, or the lanes of a DAW, in which one or many musicians can layer recordings of the past over each other to make a new song.
After the Magic demonstrated his growth as a songwriter and engineer, and Sky Hundred is the result of him applying his new trick to his old chiptuned guitar heroics, this time with a newfound sense of space and time. There are no gentle, swelling strings on Sky Hundred, and the clean, reverbed guitar tones that soothed on his sophomore outing find themselves buried in waves and waves of distortion. The riffs and solos are plentiful, so much so that they are barely intelligible at the record’s most intense moments. The clean Vanessa Carlton-type piano is back, but so is the army of virtual synthesizer plugins shooting laser sounds in every direction. His trademark blown-out machine-gun drum programming (feature, not a bug) is given new weight and purpose, as if each distorted trash-can cymbal hit creates a new fracture in reality from which a new possibility can grow.
It’s designed to be overwhelming, but the best maximalist music knows when to give the listener a break. There are a lot of extended quiet, even silent, moments on the record. Some are designed to put the spotlight on a particular instrument, or feeling. There are some moments where I can’t tell if he is trying to actually provide relief from the onslaught of sound, or trying to lure the listener into a false sense of security, only to hit back with a jump scare in the form of a scream or bugged out glitch symphony. The result is a sweeping one-man-band odyssey spanning all of the possibilities of guitar music that he could think of in a given moment. It feels just as indebted to the shoegaze gods as it is Anamanaguchi’s Endless Fantasy and Sadness’s April Sunset. I hesitate to even call Parannoul “shoegaze” any more. Even “post-rock” feels too limiting, because even the most expansive songs on the record are still pop-rock songs at heart.
The second side starts with the three-part 14-minute epic “Evoke Me,” which builds to a triumphant cry of “We’re sky hundred,” one of the few lines sung in English. It’s an acknowledgement that all of the memories, imagined or real, and recordings, and ideas, and tangible trails left in his life are still only himself. The hundred is really just one. As Dylan Baldi put it, in his own ode to living in the present amid constant doubts and what-ifs, “I’m not you, you’re a part of me.” There is no point in harboring “nostalgia for absence”, or dwelling too long the decisions of an imagined other. Why mourn what isn’t there, when you can take your limited time and stuff is as full of sounds, magic, and beautiful chaos as humanly possible? - Pad(annoul)