“Sun King Eternal Peace” – depicting depth, material and spiritual, in concise musical pieces

Maxwell Page Fairchild is the creator of The XXXIX Empire, a project based around the three personalities – The Sun King, Jimmy Carter and Maxx 39 – through which Fairchild writes, performs, records, produces and creates music. Maxwell grew up in West Los Angeles under serene circumstances, up until middle school when his family ran into housing difficulties and he later began to suffer various issues like depression, suicidal tendencies, weight problems and other social afflictions. However he found happiness in music. “The Sun King highlights my skill as a Singer and Percussionist,” says Maxwell. “The Sun King represents all the positive aspects of me as a human being as well as my feminine side. I adopted the name as a nickname in High School after the song entitled “Sun King” from The Beatles album Abby Road.”

Psychedelic R&B, Experimental Chorale Music, Alternative Acoustic, and a cappella, is just some of the flavors you’ll come across in – The Sun King’s sophomore album, “Sun King Eternal Peace”. The Sun King’s dedication to the beauty of sound, paired with exquisite lyrics and hypnotic percussion, results in a poetic combination that creates a unique sonic experience. These works are existential choral moments, beautifully crafted, and harmonized to express a compressed moment in time. The fluid lines and blossoming harmonies give these 27 tracks their own highly personal and irresistible magic.

Such sublime sonorities as the opening track, “Post Falsehood” transcend descriptions, although these choral works do suggest affinities with world music, blues roots and tribal sounds. With its unknowable expanses and humanity-eclipsing power, nothing evokes the feeling of the sublime than rhythm and voice.

This is evident on the tracks, “Sought”, “Sunflower” and “Peligrosas”, using the tonal idiom chromatically and atmospherically. Of course if you care to listen above the tones, you will hear lyrics like: “We are being manipulated every single day my friends”, on “Divide and Conquer”.

In fact, you will notice all throughout the album that many of these micro-songs carries one single focused message hosted in a repeated line of text. Often the song title tells it all. If you ignore the lyrics, the music creates a sensation of endless bliss on most of these songs.

So to grasp the songwriter’s entire intention you’ll have to listen to the lyrics. In a hugely enjoyable collection of choral and percussive items The Sun King offers something for everyone, from the serious to the tastefully silly. But it’s at the serious end of the musical spectrum, like on “False Dichotomy”, where The Sun King’s virtuosity and fabulous tonal range fully reside.

Few musicians excel as The Sun King does in depicting space and depth, material and spiritual, in such concise musical pieces.  He has the craft of rendering and compacting all that is excessive, immense, and ambitious in both spiritual and natural man, into just about a minute. Especially entertaining is “Pussy Gallore”, “Elevate From Fall” and “Feel The Burn”, but there really is so much to bury yourself into here.

What The Sun King wants his listeners to do, is follow the narrative in the music, and also to feel the beauty and harmony of the colors and tones. His eclectic musical art delivers both emotion and personal ideologies. “Sun King Eternal Peace” provides perhaps a supreme example of how creative music links the 21^st Century idealizations of the sublime to the avant-gardism of a modern independent composer.

OFFICIAL LINKS: WEBSITE – INSTAGRAM

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