Electronic music that relies heavily, almost exclusively on synthesizers (analog or not) for its creation can often run the risk of sounding plastic and unemotional. Bakis Sirros, the Greek electronic artist better known as Parallel Worlds, actually does a fantastic job of avoiding this crux. His use of analog synth sweeps and washes offset the methodical, nearly robotic rhythmic structures that still populate the majority of electronic music to date. Let me clarify that: I have no problem with the current state of rhythm and beat programming in electronic music, except when it comes to cookie-cutter club style tracks that have little or no melodic paint brushes to color the canvas. Many artists, from Lusine to Murcof to Helios, are finding interesting ways to layer beats that would have otherwise been rump-shaking club tracks at best, and I feel that Sirros is definitely granted membership to that group. However, his strength really lay in his synth work over the beat.

It is in his melodic signature that he demonstrates a creeping, carking style that immediately reminded me of about a dozen different sci-fi movies and their respective soundtracks. Maybe it was because I had just recently caught Flash Gordon on one of the billion movie channels that come with digital cable, but I couldn’t help thinking of the fearful arrival of Max von Sydow as Ming the Merciless around every corner when listening to “Into the Caves of the Mind.” Somewhere in the layered buffet of analog synths shines an interplanetary malice; the suggestion of something terrible to come. Then, on “Mindmists,” the rumbling, magma-bubbling bassline immediately renders images of Sarah Connor and Kyle Reese limp-running away from the twisted remains of a cyborg with an unrelenting directive to end their lives.

Sirros’s sound is new and fresh in his own presentation, but still recalls the drug-hazy sci-fi imagination of the late 70s and early 80s. I guess what I’m trying to say is, don’t look to Obsessive Surrealism to give you that warm, sunny afternoon feel that Boards of Canada so finely crafted. Instead, seek the darkly introspective and the nearly dystopian. In fact, listen to this album as a soundtrack to a re-reading of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World or Orwell’s 1984, because this album is most certainly for the paranoid in all of us. The paranoid who is waiting for the roof to cave in or Winston Smith to suddenly go darting through your backyard with stormtroopers in pursuit.

With Obsessive Surrealism, Sirros deals with the dark and unattractive side of the psyche in a very beautiful way and I like it. The album acts as an audio companion to some campfire catharsis. Something much needed for so many, but widely discarded.

-Gabriel Bogart