The film One Hundred Billion Points of Light takes imperfect moments and turns them into something strangely beautiful, allowing rough edges, quiet fears, and dense digital textures to exist together. The album One Hundred Billion Points of Light by Valley Taylor shows a clear appreciation for the idea of not interfering too much. In eight songs Taylor takes simple concepts and lets them develop into something much more extensive without at the same time losing the feeling that originally made them special. The songs started out as rough demos, many of them having been made with no more than a phone, a guitar or a voice quickly recorded. When they eventually became the final album they had acquired additional layers of guitars, programmed drums, piano, synths, loops and processed sounds. Nevertheless the emotional core stays remarkably similar to that of the early recordings.
“Dog” is a clear example of this. Although the song begins with an intimate foundation provided by the guitar, there is a great deal going on beneath the surface as it progresses. A combination of acoustic guitar, Bass VI, synth textures and Geoff Nelson’s guitar work creates a richer sonic environment around the original songwriting. Taylor’s production continues to add further details without causing the song to lose its connection with where it started. The track has a personal feel since there is still a sense of space within all those layers. Rather than aiming to produce a perfectly polished indie-rock song, the focus is on how much atmosphere can be built up around a simple emotional idea. The song ‘Don’t You Wanna Be Fine?’ achieves that kind of intimacy in a different way. It presents one of the more thoughtful notions on the album, namely the idea that life doesn’t have to be judged by whether all of our decisions were right. Taylor considers the process of growing older, makes mistakes, imagines alternate versions of his or her life and still ends up at the same conclusion. There’s a quiet sense of liberation in that idea. Rather than dwelling on the person you could have been, the song encourages you to accept the person you actually became. That sensation fits in easily with the rest of the record; tracks including “My Fault”, “I Would Just Screw It Up”, “Set Up to Fail”, “Do My Best”, “Spit” and “Sober” keep up the album’s focus on self-doubt, mistakes, uncertainty and the complicated journey of trying to get to know oneself. There is no effort made to present those topics in a more favourable light than they actually are. The production adheres to the same approach as the lyrics. At times it is dense and heavily processed, while at other times it has the effect of having been recorded in a bedroom and left with its imperfections.
The contrast is what gives *One Hundred Billion Points of Light* so much of its character. Rather than polishing a guitar part, Taylor adds numerous layers of digital manipulation and deliberately leaves a vocal or musical element a bit rough since doing so would mean losing something important. Thus the album acts as a meeting point between lo-fi songwriting and detailed production. There is also a strong sense of place beneath the record; the music evolved as Taylor moved from Winters to El Cerrito, and the change from a hotter, sunnier area to a more coastal and overcast one seems to match the mood of the album. The songs usually have the feel of being set in quiet drives, grey afternoons, long conversations, or instances when you are among people yet still occupied with your own thoughts. The title One Hundred Billion Points of Light seems appropriate for that reason; the album isn’t aiming for a single perfect answer but instead collects little observations, memories, mistakes, sounds and emotions and allows them all to coexist. What is so appealing about the record is that it does not regard imperfection as something that has to be overcome; rather, Taylor discovers beauty in the incomplete sections. The outcome is an album which can be dense without becoming overwhelming, nostalgic without becoming stuck in the past, and vulnerable without having every song become a confession. *One Hundred Billion Points of Light* is in the end about coming to terms with the idea that a life can be messy, incomplete and yet still be worth celebrating.
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