Aughflair is a mysterious young man from Argentina. He was one of the founding members of the now inactive group Mangled Music Collective, which brought together several talented artists and forged relationships that paved the way for Triplicate Records. Aughflair's 2017 self-released album "Rewritten" showed us a good combination of melodic ambience mixed with hard driving beats and acid synth lines. Three years later we bring you "Nowhere". A short, highly personal EP that carries on where he left off, taking us deeper into his world.

~Michael Southard - Triplicate Records

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Back in late 2018 a discord friend had approached me to talk about creating a soundtrack for a visual novel he was planning, he suggested I take inspiration from Bladerunner, specifically the heartbreak scene where Gosling is looking at the hologram of his cyber-wife. Slowly the project faded into nothing and I was left with a bunch of attempts at creating an atmosphere with synths. Now mid 2019 after slowly coming out of a crippling fear of getting out of bed I decided to slowly chip away at this EP, after months of distilling the mindset i was in at the time, i finally was able to have a project that seemed ready.

It's a story about two people who are falling in love but don't know what eachother looks like, they can't interact physically nor verbally, and so they can only rely on their own mutual trust. It all seems to go well except when one of the sides starts doubting if the other's narrative is actually true. It's a relationship that quickly turns bitter with questioning, half truths and weaponized trust. A story that starts out scary but fun, only to delve into a spiral of psychological abuse that climaxes with a sudden separation, and a thousand doubts with only one answer available by default: nothing.

~Kevin Magallanes (Aughflair)

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Aughflair; electric wunderkind from the realm of the Tango; alumnus of the shadowy synthwave-laden halls of the defunct Mangled Music Collective Headquarters has risen from the ether protectively clutching what looks to be a new record. The man's been comfortably kicking it in the underground for a while now, with whispers of a Triplicate debut in the air for the best part of year now, and the effort that has gone into polishing these pieces couldn't be more apparent. Where's he been? Well the album is called 'Nowhere', but don't read too much into that.

Opening up this batch we have 'Time Stretcher', which unsurprisingly stretches time (Time being represented here by lush wailing synth draws which float longingly around the entrance sign to Aughflair's carnival). Delving a little deeper and after some tense cymbal rides we have the dropping of the beat, an inevitability and a staple in the young producers works but nonetheless a welcome inclusion on the grounds that it slaps pretty hard before the queasy melody frightens itself and the rest of the song out of the room to be swiftly replaced with the wistful gloom of 'Hairy Caterpillar'.

While a thin line of true aural beauty bleeds out, burning synths bleach holes in the tender fabric of the piece; like pixilated god rays in a 2.5D plane. Elsewhere demonic static-filtered voices gently consume your soul. If you've ever wondered what it'd sound like if the entity from the Event Horizon (1997) made fractalesque yet surprisingly chill ambient music, here's your chance to nip that in the bud.

It has long been a highlight of Aughflair's skills-repertoire as a producer to marry the concepts of harsh grit and playfulness of melody, but the opening two tracks possess a level of emotional maturity as of yet unfathomable to dozens of artists twice his age. Almost as if he's aware that he's demonstrated his serious-producer chops, the third track; the epic and appropriately named 'All Time Star' dramatically spirals into a cyclone of pure hedonistic joy. Layer upon layer of fairground inspired arpeggio-passages waltz all over a skippy little beat that grows in speed until it hits the compositional pinnacle of the record and everyone is seeing stars.

Camouflage arrives soon after, another short but meaty track, opening with another healthy dollop of gloom to counteract the previous festivities, like an alka-seltzer after a heavy sesh. Again we are visited by the demonic lamentations heard in 'Hairy Caterpillar', and a Tangerine Dream inspired arp sequence injects a fragile hope into an otherwise fraught and lost sounding passage. Images of static haunting the horizons of a vast dark plane are relayed through the carefully crafted sound design, and further fleshed out by producer Mike Southard.

After the sound of negative energy dissipates, we're greeted by an almost jaunty piano sequence at the start of the massive final track 'Nowhere', where bleakness and cheer compete with one another for the soul of this record. Hell of course breaks loose soon enough, and distorted power chords surround the listener like aural flames. They aggressively encircle the song, but are promptly extinguished by the ever-mutating main synth sequence of the piece, which seems to incorporate a hundred different textures at once as it gradually transforms the closer into an absolute banger about five minutes in, especially owing to a couple of brief but polar-opposite in terms of tone sections of percussion laden dance music, the second of which fizzles out at the apex with the signature Aughflairian static swirl.

You're going to enjoy this brief but satisfying foray into the mysterious realm of South American bedroom electronica. This is the record many believed the talented fellow would eventually synthesize given enough time and a fine-tuning of his attention span. It is therefore most welcome that we no longer have to wonder what Aughflair is truly capable of, the obvious answer to which has always been: Quite a lot, actually.

~George Evans - Triplicate Records