All feels right

Three years after Washed Out gained more Urban Outfitters-wearing fans after a spot on the TV series ‘Portlandia,’ he visits Manila to his fans’ utter amusement.

MANILA, Philippines - It is an hour before Ernest Greene a.k.a. Washed Out goes up to perform onstage. There he is, standing on the rooftop outside Magallanes’ Alphatents, his dark waves of hair long and weaving into Manila’s skyline. Greene is right by the terminal of the city’s train tracks, and just as the rail ends, he, too, is near the conclusion of a multi-city tour across Asia. It’s all for his much-lauded musical second coming, taking form in the lush and symphonic “Paracosm,” arguably one of the best albums of 2013. In a faded chambray shirt, sleeves folding way up his arms, Greene is ready to get down to work.

It hasn’t been easy. “The reality of my professional life with Washed Out is that I might have three or four months to make a record, and we’ll play the songs for a year or a year and a half every night,” he says. Supporting him today is the formidably intense electronic act Baths; the show offers an interesting study in similarity and contrast.

For years, Greene relied much on pure electronic sounds, just as his peers did with beautifully produced and online-distributed bedroom recordings. But in his latest effort to surpass a milestone debut, he went out of his way and walked into a studio. He says it’s out of practicality: “I’ve been playing with a band for a while, and so I was hoping, with ‘Paracosm,’ to write something that will translate very easily to a live show.”

When Washed Out’s Manila show was announced, local fans got worked up: how can such an electronic artist come up with something colorful and render it live?

“I just wanna come up with the most interesting-sounding stuff that I can,” Greene says, to explain why he did “Paracosm” with mostly live instrumentation. Even trained ears would find it difficult to spot the 50-plus instruments he used on the record. It is a major swing in his musical pendulum.

On his first album “Within and Without,” it was about having a myriad of samples with hazy vocals. This time, though, he took on the challenge of playing things a hundred times to get things right, to offer a beautifully layered analog recording with high production values. The vocals are no longer washed out, either. Lyrics are now enunciated to reveal the words, no longer hushed for purely evocative purposes. It seems that Greene has just reached a personal summit of pop.

“It’s definitely a lot more chaotic and experimental, I think,” Greene says about his most recent musical ponderings. In the next few months, he may be releasing something closer to his roots as a solo music man, simply playing around with samples. But if anything’s certain, he’ll be taking it up another notch, if only for it to come face to face with the universe he created in “Paracosm.”

As he opens his set with It All Feels Right, an orchestral string track blasts out; a vision of his Georgia house window framing an idyll appears, a tribute to a forgotten artist who created a most colorful fantasy world. Suddenly, it’s a proper stadium rock anthem and everything feels right.