AeTopus is the innovative music project of Bryan Tewell Hughes, a multi-media artist whose music is influenced as much by art, nature and the human experience as it is by a singular idea or moment in his life. The moniker AeTopus suggests time (Ae), while “Topus” loosely means place. A life-long musician, Hughes began classical piano training at age 6, moving through musical immersions in heavy metal and punk, eventually being drawn to join the sonic slipstream of ambient and electronic music. When not creating new sounds with analog and digital synthesis, percussion, field recordings or found objects in his downtown Bellingham, WA-based studio, Hughes finds inspiration in exploring the visual arts and hiking the mountain trails.

Hughes has won a Zone Music Reporter Award (ZMR) for Best Electronic album, and earned three Best Electronic album nominations. Cup is his first album on Spotted Peccary Music, he has seven prior releases on the 12Ton Productions label – 2002: Memories of the Elder, 2006: Tempula, 2012: Between Empires, 2013: Angels and Machines (EP), 2015: When, 2018: Totem Totum, 2020: Deep Variants (EP), 2020: VARIANT, and in 2022: Urbus.

Electronica, pastoral New Age, and sometimes sounding like Dark Ambient, each track on the album Cup is an intact universe of sound, instrumental electronics with surprises. Think of a Tarot Deck, filled with ancient provocative images, each card telling a story, each track standing alone, together they make up a journey’s worth of fresh inventions and places to visit. Each track is a mini-epic soundworld, redolent and complex, clear and dynamic.

Imagine wandering in the wilderness, you might sense that danger is out there. We are traveling light, the notes are cycling, signaling into infinity, into an increasingly complex cold expanse. “Pure” (4:45) emerges bringing tones, sputtering percussion and melodic motion flowing in dynamic mixed density.

In some old religions, a relic is an object or article of religious significance from the past. This place is mysterious, and it could be at night now, spooky tension with a compelling steady beat. When the “Relic” (5:45) object is revealed, surrounding forms are dancing in the dark cathedral to a sacred tempo, slow and stately, a processional, and then the beat takes on a strong brisk pace. “Sygna” (5:10), brings abundant odd noises tucked into the mix, just a wink of a sound here and there, the beat sounds like it might come from an olden hand drum, sparse and crisp.
The final track begins, “Soft Green” (7:02), in a curious forest the night is long. Now the rippling form is stronger, knitting the strands, ominous and dark, the tension is slowly building and then relaxing, becoming sparse and then continuing to build again. Off ahead the forest has distant hills, darkness is always on the edges of the picture. The distant hills are forested and soon there is a complex melodic beat, weaving and layering, never too dense, eventually the pace fairly flies.

The music of Cup suggests a fresh emphasis on spontaneous, automatic, and subconscious creation, I feel the expanding listener-dependent possibilities of aural space through these compositions which invoke well considered ideas of quantum mechanics, as well as idiosyncratic interpretations of the totemic vision and the spatial structure of Samish and Tlingit painting from British Columbia. The sound is cool and austere, and prepares the ground for an emerging new spatial vision, anarchic, and highly idiosyncratic. To capture the glorious spirit of the sea one need not depict all of its tiny ripples. Each track is an intricate kinetic picture, imagine palaces with many rooms, the visitor is responding to melodic solutions for what are primarily emotional conflicts, personal interactions, dreamscape matters, feelings and expanding creativity.