Comprised of Jacqueline Caruso (keys and vocals) and Augustus Green (bass, synth, production/beats and sound design), Washington, DC-based psych pop duo The Galaxy Electric specialize in a sound and aesthetic that adeptly meshes Brazilian bossa nova and Tropicalia, 60s psychedelia and early synthesizer experimentation. And as you may know, the duo of Caruso and Green add to that aesthetic by utilizing, old-fashioned and old-timey, lo-fi recording techniques, the use of sound design-inspired arrangements and vintage reverb and echo pedals and devices with the end result being a trippy and immersive sound that sounds as though it came out of 1966-1967 or so.
Last month, I wrote about “Temporal” off their recently released full-length everything Everything Is Light and Sound, a single that had the duo pairing Caruso’s gorgeous vocals with twisting and turning synth chords, bop-era jazz syncopation and a sinuous bass line filtered through gentle layers of reverb and echo. And as I wrote last month, the single simultaneously focused on both the nature of time and our experience of it while evoking a similar vision of the future presented by the 1964 World’s Fair — a hopeful world that has used science and technology to solve humanity’s greatest problems in an efficient and timely fashion. The album’s latest single “Please Come Home” continues in the same path as its preceding single — although it’s slightly less jazz-leaning; however, more importantly, the song manages to possess a plaintive longing and heartache, as its narrator is begging her lover to come home because they’re so desperately needed.
As the band explains about the recently released music video, the video was composed of raw footage shot with 2 Super 8 cameras — a Nizo Professional and a Bolex 160 Macrozoom — on Wittner/Afga 200D Color Reversal film while the duo was on the banks of the Wicomico River in Maryland. “No editing was performed digitally, just tiling” And as the duo explains “it was inspired by our love and appreciation for the founder of the French Impressionist movement, Claude Monet, who found it important to document the same shot as it evolved over time and under different conditions.” And the end result is a video that gorgeously captures both the slowly evolving nature of time as we observe it, and in another way it forces us to slow down and consider nuances over immediate gratification.
