Aarktica

Jon DeRosa, the Los Angeles musician, has sustained Aarktica as his longest-running and most prolific outlet. The project surfaced initially through the wintry guitar drones of its 2000 debut, No Solace in Sleep, then shifted toward electronic dream pop with the 2002 album Or You Could Just Go Through Your Whole Life and Be Happy Anyway while absorbing Indian classical and jazz elements on later efforts such as 2005’s Bleeding Light, which brought in brass, harmonium, strings, and further acoustic textures. Even as DeRosa turned to chamber pop under his own name during the 2010s, he preserved Aarktica for colder, atmospheric explorations, among them 2019’s Mareación.

DeRosa first performed in punk and hardcore groups during his teenage years before drawing influence from artists on the ambient goth label Projekt. Coping with irreversible hearing loss in his right ear, he started constructing minimal guitar-based soundscapes to articulate his personal experience of sound. Using a four-track recorder inside various New York University dorm rooms in the late ’90s, he assembled his first Aarktica album, No Solace in Sleep, which Silber Records issued in 2000; Ochre Records followed with the EP Morning One in 2001. Early the next year Darla placed the more vocal-oriented Or You Could Just Go Through Your Whole Life and Be Happy Anyway as volume 18 of its Bliss Out series, enlisting Lorraine Lelis of Mahogany and downtempo/IDM DJ Aaron Spectre.

Aarktica returned to Silber Records in February 2003 with Pure Tone Audiometry, an album that juxtaposed gentle lullabies against atonal outbursts and feverish percussion against sedate drones, echoing DeRosa’s studies with minimalist pioneers La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela. Charles Newman of Flare co-produced the record, which also featured Plexus bassist Ernie Adzentovich together with Mahogany’s Andrew Prinz and Lelis on cello and vocals respectively. Darla released Bleeding Light in February 2005 as a conceptual tribute to New York, while German label Moonbunny issued the split EP Ocean with Spectre.

After moving to Southern California, DeRosa delivered Aarktica’s lushly orchestrated fifth full-length, Matchless Years, in 2007. He next returned to Silber with 2009’s In Sea, which contained a cover of “Am I Demon?” by Danzig, one of the formative influences for the New Jersey-born DeRosa. In Sea Remixes followed, presenting reinterpretations by Landing, thisquietarmy, Yellow6, and others. Although DeRosa began issuing singer/songwriter material under his own name in 2011, he maintained experimental work as Aarktica, resulting in the limited EP Ceremony on Fnord Tapes in 2015. The meditative full-length Mareación, shaped by ayahuasca journeys, appeared in 2019. A year later Projekt released Eating Rose Petals, a collaboration between Aarktica and Black Tape for a Blue Girl that featured label founder Sam Rosenthal’s interpretations of one of Mareación’s highlights.