Adam Worthan titled his five-minute medley of tremulous strings and undulating drones “The Echo of Yesterday,” and when posting it to his SoundCloud account he affixed to it more than its fair share of descriptive tags. These are weighted toward genre (ambient, electronic, soundtrack, soundscape, drone, shoegaze, dreamy, space, experimental) but also emphasize technique and technology (ambient guitar, loops, reverb, guitar ambient). And then there are these three: emotional, nostalgia, nostalgic. The emphasis on the past is emphatic, but the question is: Which past? Is it a personal past, either individual or projected/shared, that the piece probes, or is the past the reservoir of techniques that he embraces, explores, and pushes through toward his own unique musical voice? Perhaps it is both at once.
Track originally posted for free download at soundcloud.com/adamworthan. More on Worthan, who is based in Atlanta, Georgia, at adamworthan.bandcamp.com. The above image, from Worthan’s instacanv.as account, accompanied the song (albeit in black and white) when it was posted to his SoundCloud account.