"Here, son, time becomes space" - so utters the Grail Knight Gurnemanz to the Holy Fool Parsifal in the opening movements of Wagner's inscrutable final opera. As Andrew Rowan's masterful, brief, and discrete EP of decontextualized art song known as NATURAL HISTORY STUDY unfolds from my clenched, cradled phone, I watch a low poly raven balance precariously atop a gleaming sword, I watch a glitching cavalier repeatedly signal for mercy at the top of a siege ladder before succumbing to an arrow through the helmet, I watch a bored jester default character animation down an imperceptible roadway, I watch an antique candle threatening to topple and burn, but never giving over. There is something deeply classical in this elegant, brilliantly perplexing work, but something dizzying and disorienting as well - we know not the woods we wander through as the chamber octet shifts, as the drum machine folds in on itself, as recordings are layered, shifted, and resampled. We break the bow over our knee, unclear if the implement is for the string or the eye of the enemy.

Tape hiss, möbius strip rhythms, ghostly apparatus, and the aching swell of a sensitively composed and conducted chamber ensemble are the lingua franca of the STUDY. Played by a murderer's row of LA instrumentalists and arranged on record by a madman, the music is so frustratingly, unnervingly beautiful, played, mixed, and realized with confounding restraint - my ear wants these pieces to repeat ad nauseam, to revel in their loveliness, to crack the four minute mark, and instead Rowan seems to take real delight in tugging out the rug from under us, and while we wait in agony for more chordal center shifts among the eight players, a drum machine cannibalizes its motherboard. A vocational orchestrator of music for film himself, I'm not surprised to hear hints of the darker arts of Jon Brion, particularly the forwards-and-backwards, slightly menacing splendor of his soundtrack for "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind." Near the end of the music, we hear a held string chord get stuck in the menacing metal teeth of a vaporwave mall escalator, no one around to save it - mangled and compressed, the sound cuts out.

As I've already described, the music is accompanied by a whole NATURAL HISTORY STUDY-verse of vertical video court intrigue, beautifully realized by art director and cover artist Nick Lane. Animations and behaviors are looped, but - much like the music - they're never perfect. Which is *so* perfect - no repetition of content, no matter how precisely replicated or mangled on slapped-together magnetic tape, can ever be exactly equal. Because by the time the next iteration comes around, you have already hurtled through entropic time one loop longer and look now, your vectors are all wonky. The visuals are uncanny and uncannily good - the juxtaposition of delicately arranged strings and horns against an aggressively early digital aesthetic brings to mind the underwater level splendor of the music video for Radiohead's "Pyramid Song" and you, too, might feel that teetering crow look directly into your specific eyes - we walk through the valley.

"What the fuck even is this" you might be saying to yourself, squinting toward the animations, craning your perplexed ears closer to the wooly, warping sounds. An obscure, forgotten video game left whirring overnight in a Playstation, a 200-polygon avatar discovers consciousness and wanders off screen. Yourself in a mirror, but not quite right. An inscrutable and inappropriately violent New Yorker cartoon whose punchline fascinates you but you couldn't explain to someone else. The incessant repetitive yearn of birdsong. In the absence of intervention, how do the ghosts in all the machines live out their sunset years? This is a STUDY.

-liner notes by Ben Seretan