"Spend any time at DIY house parties or experimental shows in the Chicago underground scene and you will come to know the music of multi-instrumentalist Tom Owens. His solo jams as Potions, conveyed from a complex system of synths, samplers, and drum machines, have sparked innumerable room-shaking grooves, sending even the normies present to confer with their gyrating bros about how "This is really weird, but I like it." Having studied jazz guitar in college, Owens restarted his musical practice to explore the possibilities of electronic composition - while releasing his own music and his friends' work through his tape label Pretty All Right. Despite their humble terrestrial origins, the sessions that constitute Light and Dark embody a unique strain of analog performance that conjures a vibe closer to space age lounge music than any sub-genre of contemporary dance. ..... Potions tinkers with a palette of post-Yellow Magic Orchestra electronic exotica, charged with tightly programmed beats and intricately layered synth arrangements. Drum patterns clatter through polyrhythmic configurations, evolving into new variations at a rate that shatters expectations of recursion. Melodies unwind in swathes of day-glo activity over labyrinthine chord progressions, locking into memorable harmonic contrasts and moments of pure major-key bliss. Potions cherry-picks tactics from various electronic traditions and repurposes them as logical elements of his dense arrangements: squelching Aphex acid basslines, slow filter sweeps that wash out entire backdrops, four-on-the-floor bass drum patterns laid against syncopated toms and cowbell clicks."