An Upward Obsession is the latest record from Pittsburgh-based producer and multi-instrumentalist Andrew Abboushi. It moves through ambient stillness, cinematic motion, and something harder to name — music that feels less like a genre and more like a conviction.
What opens quietly does not stay that way. Rhythm emerges the way light enters a room — not announced, simply present. From there the record moves without apology between the hymnal and the restless, the delicate and the forceful, the spare and the orchestral. It carries within it the weight of blues and soul, the architecture of neo-classical composition, the emotional directness of folk — not as influences worn on the surface, but as something absorbed so deeply it simply becomes the voice of the thing.
It was made from the belief that discipline and love, sustained together long enough, produce something neither could produce alone — and that the listener can feel the difference between music made that way and music that wasn't. It asks only that you bring the same quality of attention to the listening that went into the making. That exchange — between the sincerity of the making and the openness of the listening — is where the music actually lives.
Music is, at its core, a study in three dimensions simultaneously — rhythm as a relationship with time, harmony as a relationship with emotion, melody as a relationship with expression. Where language separates idea from feeling, music collapses that distance entirely. The two arrive together, or not at all.
It also serves something immediate and practical. Music brings people to their feet — in cathedrals and concert halls, in headphones on a morning run, in the quiet of a room that needed filling. It gives emotional weight to ordinary stretches of life. It fuels and it soothes, often within the same track. That music can do all of this at once — can be intellectually rigorous and physically visceral and privately comforting simultaneously — is precisely what makes it worth the devotion.
Pittsburgh producer Andrew Abboushi creates worlds that go beyond his synthesizer. Album opener and highlight "The First Wise Man" starts out with minimal dollops of synth and guitar before building into an oscillating progression that drops out at odd moments. Individual silences expand, giving the sensation of a machine slowly swallowing up space. Finally, digitized drum, piano, and guitar noisily overwhelms everything else. When the initial piano returns, it's accompanied by an entire orchestra — just one stunning moment from an EP full of them.
Hubert Adjei-Kontoh
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Andrew Abboushi plays guitar, synthesizer, and bass. He produces, engineers, and arranges his own work — every element, every decision, from first note to final mix.
His deepest influences are architectural. The conviction that form and function can exist in spiritual union — that structure and atmosphere are not in opposition but expressions of the same impulse — shapes his music more than any record ever has.
The work lives in contrast. Restraint against power. Purity against obscurity. Precision and improvisation held in the same breath. Organic harmony is never imposed — it is arrived at, often through knowing when to stop rather than when to continue.
What results doesn't belong to any single tradition. Emo and math rock, neo-classical, ambient, cinematic, blues, soul, folk — these are materials, not allegiances. The music lives in the spaces between them.