The Floating Opera is the debut album from US artist BDYWRKS, who embraces static and abstraction as gateways to gorgeous harmonic drift and tactile melodic exploration. Its six chapters offer a transportive world of vaporous swells and fragmented beauty, born from a period of emotional isolation in the artist’s life, when the acts of composition and experimentation became essential therapy. Named in homage to Issey Miyake’s Bodyworks gallery exhibit (1983), they recall, “I was particularly taken with photographs of his mannequins seemingly floating up to the ceiling, and from the start, I wanted to make a sonic mirror of that.”

The skillful, cohesive assemblage of disparate elements here is a direct result of an intuitive process, as the artist notes, “I treat each session as a constantly evolving, living thing, and in editing, I consider the possibilities of how much further I can go with spaces and frequencies.” As its many layers intersect and disperse, momentary consonances appear and vanish, while a quivering bed of static, always hovering at the fringes, provides reliable solace.

The Floating Opera is framed as a “sister album” to Forgetting You Is Like Breathing Water, Trump’s spacious 2024 collaboration with trumpeter Will Evans, which shares with it a devotion to spontaneous beauty, and a veneration of all the transient details that appear in the course of improvisation. Speaking candidly about their depression, relocation, and recovery, the artist summarizes, “The period in which I made this album was defined by self-medication and spiraling; whereas Forgetting You was a form of emergence from that darkness, The Floating Opera fed on and thrived within it.”