It’s a modern version of the chicken and the egg question- do images have soundtracks, or is it sounds that have imagetracks? Anyone can provide a pop culture mini-thesis on the ways that music affects images, from waxing philosophic on The Graduate to stuttering praise for Garden State (it’s a generational thing). In those films, music adds context to images, working as a kind of cover to contain all those colors and shapes inside a single mood.But when, if ever, do we think about images giving context to sound? Even music videos, the chief evidence of this phenomenon, end up using music to supplement their iconic images. Whether it’s an elaborate pop-opera like Thriller or just a video of some guys playing in a band, it’s still the images that tell the story, whether that story is about a werewolf-zombie wearing leather or a group of hipsters whose clothes send the message that “We are really cool and, also, really skinny.” Music plays second fiddle even in its own promotion. Images are too powerful to want to yield their ground.That’s what makes the Seven Fields of Aphelion interesting- if you take it in right, you can find a truly mutual relationship between the group’s images and music. Using photography and music, Seven Fields of Aphelion is evenly mixed media- to strain for an analogy, there’s no chunks in the artistic batter.Listen to a song like “Grown” and you could get lost inside the ambience as easily as you would wandering through a forest. There’s a few guiding chords along the way, but you’re largely left on your own to feel through the bark and get something out of it. Of course, with the right attitude, music like this can be its own reward- it’s like a meditation on melody with a mantra no one’s allowed to hear. But it helps to have something to focus on, and if you look at Seven Fields of Aphelion’s photography, you might have an idea of what to look at.And that’s part of the point: “I work best when my consciousness is off in a field and I just sit and play until something pulls at me so I’ll play it again and the sounds drive me, rather than some specific idea or vision.” That quote is courtesy of Seven Fields of Aphelion’s mouthpiece, Maux. (Why the pseudonym? “So it’s not about me at all – mostly,” Maux tells Freshout.) The two are meant to work with and against each other at the same time, so that each holds the other in or, perhaps, fills it up. Maux notes that being open to possibilities in her music and photography “leaves room for nature to take its course without interference. It leaves room to sense things about places and sounds.” Look at a photo like First Sight Chicago and you can see that openness. With a long reflective gaze, these multiple and long exposed images are open in the most direct way - they let in extra light and, hopefully, extra meaning as well. That argument gains strength when you listen to Maux’s music while letting the images set the mood.Her MySpace Page features images and the song Slow Subtraction (along with the temptation to ask one of her many friends exactly how you pronounce “Maux”). If her pictures sit in one window while music plays in the other, the experience is a little like breathing in the haze in her photographs. One part of the music slides into the next just like moments in the photographed cities, landscapes, and portraits- construction paves over nature, neon brightens, and thinkers walk while the music stays in constant focus, key by key pressing from one minute to the next. It’s a bit like standing over a boiling pot of water to take in both at the same time.Naturally, that might sound a little heavy for something that could occur on MySpace, or in any sort of lucid non-medicated state. There is an irrefutable defense, however, when Seven Fields does the image-sound match up work for you. The video Time Lapses (contained here in a zip file) is like the completion of Maux’s work. Images slide along jerkily along a trolley line of a song - this video replaces the trance like leak of some of her other songs and replaces it with a series of blinks at life. If you’re unwilling to do the work of listening and watching, this video does it for you, and it’s the rush that you would expect.The video also carries you to an eventual epiphany about its title - for a careful viewer, “Time Lapses” isn’t a noun, it’s a statement: Time lapses. And as it lapses, we are carried along for the journey in images and sounds together. “There’s a pull,” Maux says. That pull is the mix of image and sound, working together while time steams up. That pull also offers one stab at an answer to that age old question of whether the chicken or the egg came first. The Seven Fields of Aphelion might suggest that the answer is, somehow, that they both came at once.

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