Aeseaes's Dream-Pop Reverie, Opia: Echoes July CD of the Month
By John Diliberto 6/20/2025
We’re currently living in a musical age of simplicity. It’s a different kind of minimalism, where sparse instrumental melodic fragments, backings and effects lead to richly designed moods. You can hear it in the sound of SUSS, Marconi Union, Balmorhea, Olafur Arnalds and of course, Brian Eno. It’s not a music of virtuosity with impressive instrumental or vocal technique, but a virtuosity of mood.
Aeseaes has captured that mood on their latest album, Opia. The duo is Travis Chapman and Allie Eissler, a husband and wife team who met at the University of Texas in Austin about 12 years ago. Chapman is primarily an upright bass player who also has performed with the group, Balmorhea. Eissler is a guitarist and vocalist who might have been a conventional singer-songwriter if she and Chapman hadn’t come up with a haunting, almost ambient brand of dream-pop.
The couple started honing their sound 10 years ago with weekly live video streams on the Twitch platform, which they still perform faithfully, every week. But those intimate performances only hint at the minimalist complexity they create as aeseaes. That name is an adaptation of the handle they use for their live internet concerts: A Couple Streaming, or ACS
The album is introduced by backwards piano which breaks into a simple forward piano riff, guitar strum accents and some off-kilter percussion. That backs a haunting tune that could be a passionate love song, but the title, “Finifugal” actually means the fear of endings. It’s the kind of paradoxical double-meaning that plays through many of aeseaes songs.
“Humdrum,” despite its title, is one of aeseaes’s most driving tracks. A steady 4/4 trap set drum beat and accompanying bass line propel the piece, putting Allie’s fragile voice in an ecstatic, rock goddess frame, especially when they send her wailing, literally, into a deep spiraling echo.
There is a deceptive darkness to their lyrics at times. “Voice” is a seemingly passionate love song, cast like the craving of a vampire against a droning background of bowed strings. “Desire” is even more vampiric, with an ominous electric bass line from Chapman that could be out of a Siouxsie and the Banshees or Cure track.
The horror motifs continue in songs like “Horror Vacui” and “Switchblade.” They are both ominous just from their titles. Eissler says “Switchblade” was inspired by the Frankenstein story: the divided self, the creator and the monster. Against a simple guitar arpeggio, she sings a song of malevolent intent, a threat to the creator who made such a damaged mind, in other words, a threat to the self.
“Say When” is another song with a knife edge, possibly about suicide, where she feels her “blade in the middle again.” Is she harming herself, or someone else, as they “crawl into the end?” It’s enigmatic, seductively dangerous and deceptive, with its poppy “ew-ew” chorus. It’s also one of the other near-rockers on the album, with deep reverb tremolo guitar from Leo Abrahams and steady-state bass line.
Even when they’re having fun, it’s cast in dangerous tones, like “Wild West,” where Eissler places herself in an old western setting as a robber, singing “highway and a loaded gun, lawless trigger and all is won.” But she just does it so sweetly.
One of the loveliest songs is “White Noise.” It’s cast in a 4/4 rhythm with the fourth beat silent, making it sound like a waltz. Allie’s voice takes on a sly tone, as she sheds her life of distractions and clutter, the white noise that envelops emotions and intellect. She could also be eliminating people in her life as she sings, “I don’t want to hold that gun, hug the pull trigger ‘til my life is done. You know you’ll never be enough for us. Rip it up and run.”
There are all kinds of wonderful details on the album with multiple instruments drawn from remotely-recorded performers on classical strings, pedal steel guitar, trombone and harp. Among them is drummer Dan Duszinski from the bands Cross Record and Loma, and the aforementioned Leo Abrahams, a Brian Eno collaborator. They all lend sonic artifacts to the album, as mysterious as faded petroglyph scrawls spun through reverb dimensions.
The title of the album, Opia, comes from The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, which uses manufactured words to describe emotions, in this case, the sense that someone is looking at you with a gaze that could be invasive or could be vulnerable. Aeseaes lives in that contradiction and they make it as beautiful as it is mysterious.
Hear aeseaes interviewed in the Echoes Podcast