Wednesday, April 6, 2011

Dead Gaze on Atelier Ciseaux Records/La Station Radar Records


Just heard from the finger on the pulse folks at Atelier Ciseaux and La Station Radar that after putting out a few joint releases together they have officially merged! Combined they should have some pretty amazing future releases, including this latest from Dead Gaze. I had to go back and listen to that Firetalk one again...so glad Cole is getting more of his work on vinyl...I hope he's got big plans for a full length soon.

I remember talking to him a long time ago and just based on the CD-R he sent alone I wanted to talk to him for the podcast...he was an amazing encyclopedia of music knowledge...turned me onto a bunch of stuff I never heard of....really someone that can absorb a massive amount of various influences and then filter it all into his own dreamy pop aesthetic. Like I imagine Panda Bear sampling from all over the world, it's entire music history and subtly referencing the future at the same time.

The A-Side of this one, 'Somewhere Else' comes out with massive layers of swirly electronics and a solid foundation bassline. An acoustic guitar riff comes in over Cole's warbly phaser'd vocals. There's layers of texture here that sounds like peering through that dusty warped glass window to some kind of Victorian house in the middle of that Andrew Wyeth field. The chimes, strumming and oooo's adding up to more than their parts. A real mystery of gleaming and opaque fidelity, a true craftsman, excavating unusual sounds and them applying them to a patchwork pop.

'Enz' kicks off the B-Side with underwater crackling and ghostly vocals. Loops and repeated unrecognizable sounds slowly changing, gurgling up from the depths. A campfire crackling maybe, slowed down to the point of ring tone, so oversampled it becomes a rhythm. A quiet reprieve between the two journeys into muddy sunshine.

'Fishing with Robert' rounds this up with the straight ahead cool fractured pop that Dead Gaze has ready to pull out at any moment. To combine that washed out shoegaze with a catchy melody, that can sound like The Psychedelic Furs or the Cure all the way to Cloud Nothings and Minks. The textured overblown cymbal crashes and irregular vocals leave out all kinds of spaces for your mind to fill in. That's the most successful pop anti-fi is when things are left up to chance in the interpretation. So dense it calls for multiple listens and even then, it's a near mystery how things come together, I'm sure it's a little like that for Cole because you don't have to force something like this, you almost conjure it up out of thin air.

Go check out the interview from a million years ago, such a cool guy, I'm still kicking myself I wasn't in a place to be able to offer him a single...it's so great there's at least two of them out there now.

By now, you, like I did, have no excuse not to put together an order with Atelier Ciseaux or LSR and spring for the shipping...the Jeans Wilder full length is so great, I put that next to Sore Eros..and it's a good freakout modern psyche block, there's even a few Reading Rainbow/Coasting splits left, I know you wanted the US Girls or Jeans Wilder/Best Coast split...well don't miss out on this one. If you're lucky, convince fusetron or SS Records to import these.

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