Product Description
2 Paddock of Skies
3 Plurals
4 A Narrow Field of View
5 The Pulpy Center
6 Inpirrik
7 Everything is Disappearing
8 Underplump
Genre: Ambient, Electronica, Chill-out, Downtempo
RIYL: Jon Hopkins, Halftribe, Rival Consoles, Sigur Rós
Solipsis is the second release from yttriphie, the ambient project of Michael Plaster from legendary 90s Projekt ethereal act soulwhirlingsomewhere.
Yttriphie (think of the word ‘atrophy,’ but switch out the A for a short I) returns with sixty-seven minutes of powerful, melancholic music. It is lush, evocative ambience with an occasional downtempo beat or texture, a warm fog with sparse sharp edges arising from within the swirling atmospherics. Brittle strings emerge through a flickering, feathery bed of textures. Hollow pianos and eroded guitars step lightly above immense, flowing pads that surge in and back out. Distant, tiny bells echo faint rhythms that steadily ebb and flow.
The album feels partly like walking slowly in the rain at night – there’s a lone light in the distance, and one’s unsure if there’s a distinction between the rain and the tears. Rolling amongst the colossal waves in the middle of the sea, the storm clouds push their way past. There is a duality to some songs which start out with gentle, calming melodies and soft shimmering synths and halfway through shift to a dark, foreboding mood as the music swirls and is swallowed in reverb. While “The Pulpy Center” could be seen as the apex of the album with its smash of synths, horns and percussion, the sad and reflective “Everything is Disappearing” could be the emotional core of Michael’s latest creation.
About the title, Michael says, “Well, I just took the ‘m’ off the word solipsism. Very quickly, solipsism is theory that the self is all that can be known to exist. Like, I have NO way of TRULY KNOWING if this – life – is all some odd, really long ‘dream’ or a simulation, or am I a Boltzmann brain, or is it a video game, or did I die ten years ago and this is just part of that life-flashing-before-your-eyes moment, or what… And that all comes down to consciousness, which is the most truly amazing and incomprehensible thing. And we can’t even really define it. Anyhow, so I wrote all these songs for at least ONE consciousness of which I am certain. They are kinda like little stories. They have a beginning, middle and end; each traverses a path of some melody, sometimes silhouetted, towards a ‘resolution’ both musically and thematically.”
Chain DLK wrote about yttriphie’s 2025 debut, an extremely slow motion explosion, “The album feels like walking through the memory of a dream that wasn’t yours but somehow still haunts you… Plaster’s return to music after twenty years is like a message in a bottle washed ashore: wistful, timeless, and deeply personal. He wants us to hear the entropy in the air, the flow of everything falling apart yet coming together in its own sublime way.”
The eight songs stick between the throat and the lungs, capable of revealing unknown universes in the blink of an eye.
Reviews Editor –
From Chain DLK
When Michael Plaster resurfaced in 2025 with an extremely slow motion explosion, the album felt like a message that had spent two decades drifting through strange currents before finally reaching shore. It was deeply concerned with memory, entropy, and the peculiar beauty of things falling apart in slow motion. Listening to it was like wandering through someone else’s dream and gradually discovering traces of your own reflection hidden inside it.
With Solipsis, Plaster does not simply revisit that territory. He walks beyond it.
The second release under the yttriphie name feels less concerned with memory itself than with the consciousness experiencing that memory. If the previous album gazed outward toward the vast machinery of time and dissolution, Solipsis turns its attention inward, into the endlessly baffling chamber where perception, imagination, doubt, and identity all seem to share the same cramped apartment. Unsurprisingly, none of them get along particularly well.
Plaster remains best known to many listeners as a founding member of soulwhirlingsomewhere, one of the most beloved acts associated with Projekt Records’ golden era. Yet yttriphie increasingly feels less like a nostalgic return and more like the continuation of a conversation interrupted by life, silence, and the passing of years. The sensibility remains recognisable: melancholy, introspective, and emotionally generous. But the perspective has shifted.
The title itself offers a clue. By removing the final “m” from “solipsism”, Plaster transforms a philosophical doctrine into something slightly stranger and more personal. The album circles questions that have haunted thinkers for centuries: How can we know what is real? What is consciousness? Are we experiencing the world, or merely our interpretation of it? Thankfully, Solipsis never attempts to answer these questions. Humanity has already produced enough certainty about things it barely understands.
Instead, Plaster composes eight long-form pieces that inhabit uncertainty with remarkable grace. Across sixty-seven minutes, synthesizers, treated guitars, piano fragments, distant percussion, and countless half-glimpsed textures drift through one another like weather systems sharing the same sky. The music remains recognisably ambient, yet it possesses a narrative instinct that prevents it from becoming static. Every piece feels like a journey, however abstract its destination may be.
What distinguishes Solipsis from its predecessor is its increased sense of contrast. The previous album often resembled a continuous state of suspended reflection. Here, emotional weather changes unexpectedly. Gentle passages darken. Seemingly ominous textures soften into tenderness. Beauty and unease become inseparable companions, each revealing new dimensions within the other.
“Paddock of Skies” exemplifies this beautifully. Its immense duration allows Plaster to unfold ideas with patient confidence, gradually revealing hidden details buried beneath luminous surfaces. Sounds emerge and recede like distant landmarks seen through rain. The effect is immersive without ever becoming overwhelming.
That rain imagery proves difficult to escape throughout the record. Much like the strongest moments on an extremely slow motion explosion, these compositions often evoke landscapes suspended between external reality and emotional projection. One is never entirely certain whether the storm exists outside the window or within the listener. The distinction gradually loses importance.
The album’s centrepiece, “The Pulpy Center”, introduces a welcome increase in density and momentum. Horn-like textures, percussion, and swelling synthesizers gather into one of the record’s most dramatic passages. Yet even here, Plaster resists the temptation of grandiosity. The music expands rather than explodes. It accumulates pressure without seeking release. The result feels more psychologically complex than a conventional climax.
Meanwhile, “Everything is Disappearing” emerges as perhaps the album’s emotional core. The title echoes themes present throughout Plaster’s recent work, but the perspective feels different. Rather than contemplating disappearance as loss, the piece seems to accept impermanence as a condition of existence. There is sadness here, certainly, but also curiosity. The music asks what remains when familiar structures dissolve.
This sense of inquiry permeates the entire album. The tracks do not function as static ambient environments so much as thought experiments rendered in sound. Not intellectual exercises, but emotional investigations. Each composition explores a particular state of mind, tracing its contours without rushing toward conclusions.
Plaster’s experience as a songwriter continues to shape his approach, even when traditional song structures are absent. Beneath the drifting atmospheres lies a strong sense of direction. Themes return in altered forms. Tensions emerge and resolve. Emotional arcs develop naturally. The listener is never simply floating. There is always movement, however subtle.
The closing “Underplump” serves as a fitting conclusion, gathering many of the album’s recurring qualities into a final meditation on perception and uncertainty. By the time its last sounds fade, one has the sensation of waking from an unusually vivid dream and briefly questioning which side of sleep constitutes reality.
Like its predecessor, Solipsis thrives on ambiguity, but it deploys that ambiguity differently. An Extremely Slow Motion Explosion explored the poetry of dissolution, finding beauty in gradual collapse. Solipsis examines the observer standing amidst the fragments, wondering who is doing the observing in the first place.
The result is a richer, more expansive work that deepens rather than repeats the concerns of its predecessor. Michael Plaster has created an album that feels philosophical without becoming academic, emotional without becoming sentimental, and immersive without losing its sense of narrative purpose.
For a record built around the possibility that consciousness might be the only certainty available to us, it displays a remarkable generosity toward the unknown. It doesn’t seek answers. It cultivates wonder.
And sometimes wonder is the most honest response available. -Vito Camarretta
Reviews Editor –
From the.electroscape
Album of the Day
Extraordinary at eliciting imaginative visual scenes of cabins on the swamp at night, floating among the heavens, or walking in the mud in a cemetery. The atmosphere is lush and one through which the listener must wade. The ambience seemingly lifts one physically and creates a deep sense of contemplation.
Reviews Editor –
From I Die: You Die
Lastly, some deep and spacey, yet granular and busy soundscaping from Michael Plaster’s new(ish) project yttriphie. Longtime ethereal listeners will be familiar with Plaster’s 90s work on Projekt as Soul Whirling Somewhere, and while you’re still getting the gauzy gossamer drift through the astral associated with those records, there’s a tactility (and at times even crunch and earthiness) in Plaster’s compositions like this one on new LP Solipsis. Should likely appeal to those with a yen for post-millennial Pink Dots records.
Reviews Editor –
From Exposé
In the 90s there was a superb dream-pop / shoegaze act called Soulwhirlingsomewhere (or Soul Whirling Somewhere if you prefer). They released around five albums and ceased activity shortly after the turn of the century, followed by a compilation in 2004; Throughout that time, the only permanent member was singer and multi-instrumentalist Michael Plaster. In the years following that, Plaster worked with various other groups, including Black Tape for a Blue Girl. Around 2016 Plaster began releasing material under the moniker yttriphie, this time a softer, more ambient approach with no vocals; at first he released a series of single tracks (some as long as fifteen minutes), but in 2025 released a full album of material titled An Extreme Slow Motion Explosion, which we covered here in Exposé.
Solopsis is the follow-up album, with eight titles that show a considerable amount of growth and development over the debut. On the first spin, listeners will find a newfound incorporation of far more percussive elements, although the predominant style remains a shimmering, floating ambient sound much like the previous effort. Following the short opener “Anfov,” one of the album’s centerpieces arrives in the thirteen-minute “Paddock of Skies,” a sprawling and powerful epic of dreamy ambient force that begins to include some of that percussion during its second half, along with some most interesting textures, many layers deep as it progresses toward its conclusion, engulfing the listener. Beginning with a repetitive keyboard figure, “The Pulpy Center” wastes no time finding new sounds as well as interesting dynamic shifts that incorporate some beautiful melodic bell sounds and blasts of synth juxtaposed with mysterious percussion as the piece slowly works its way toward a ten-minute conclusion. The closer “Underplump” is another epic length piece that wanders in very slowly like fog in the morning, slowly taking shape over its duration into circular melodic constructs that shimmer and glisten, marking milestones that seem like the roadmap to a dream sequence. I would be remiss not to mention one of the shorter (eight minute) cuts “A Narrow Field of View” that incorporates a catchy repeating melodic figure accompanied by a drum kit, which quickly adds density, then turns a corner into more spacy realms. There’s plenty more here on Solopsis that should be of interest to adventurous listeners. -Peter Thelen