Tag: Karlos Rene Ayala

Video by William Ruben Helms

New Video: Low Releases a Gorgeous and Intimate Visual for Yearning “Days Like These”

n 1993, the acclaimed Duluth-based indie act  Low — currently founding members and married couple Alan Sparhawk (guitar, vocals) and Mimi Parker (drums) with Steve Garrington (bass) — are considered pioneers of slowcore, an indie rock sub-genre featuring slowed down tempos and minimalist-leaning arrangements. Despite the fact that the acclaimed indie act has gone through series of lineup changes throughout their history, they’ve consistently disapproved of the slowcore term, eventually shrugging off its strictures altogether while continuing to cement their reputation for a magnetic and powerful stage show centered around Sparhawk’s and Parker’s harmonies and heartbreakingly gorgeous material.

ne of the most uncompromisingly defiant, brazenly abrasive, challenging yet stunning albums of their expansive catalog. The trio worked with Burton on 2015’s Ones and Sixes and as the story goes, they wanted to go further with Burton and his aesthetic, to see what someone who as Sparhawk has described as “a hip-hop guy” could do to push their music in a radically new directions. Instead of obsessively writing, revising and rehearsing in Duluth before heading to the studio, the band went to Eau Claire, WI with rough ideas and sketches for one of the most collaborative writing sessions they’ve ever had with a producer.

During those sessions, they’d build pieces up, break them down and build up them up again until each individual song found its purpose and force. Over the two year writing and recording sessions, the outside world slide deeper into madness and instability — and Double Negative may be a document of our peculiar moment: the material is at times loud, contentious, chaotic and jarring. Sparhawk’s and Parker’s vocals sometimes seem to be desperately fighting against the noise and chaos, other times hidden with it.

The acclaimed Duluth-based act’s 13th album HEY WHAT is slated for a September 10, 2021 release through their longtime label home Sub Pop Records. Continuing their ongoing collaboration with producer BJ Burton for the third time, HEY WHAT reportedly finds the trio focusing on their craft, staying out of the fray and holding fast to their faith to find new ways to express the discord and delight of being a living human being, to turn the duality of our existence into hymns we can share. The album’s ten songs are individually built by their own undeniable hooks — and are turbocharged by the vivid textures surrounding them.

HEY WHAT’s first single “Days Like These” is a perfect example of what we should expect from the album’s overall sound and aesthetic: Disorientating and hushed passages with strummed guitar fight for space between layers of noise and distortion that accrete, build up and fall apart. The messiness is all held together by Sparhawk’s and Parker’s gorgeous yet slightly AutoTuned harmonies, seemingly serving as a lifeline from the shore, thrown to the poor soul drowning in the breakers. But at its core, the song is a yearning plea for meaning and peace in a world that’s completely mad and rarely makes much sense.

Directed by the band’s longtime friend and collaborator, director Karlos Rene Ayala, the recently released video for “Days Like These” is a stylish yet intimate look into the daily life of an older Black man in an extremely White place. While he may be lonely, this gentleman has his dignity, humanity and faith — seen with a Cadillac plastered with Biblical passages and time at a local church.

Video by William Ruben Helms

New Video: Dutch Indie Act The Homesick Release a Surreal, Animated Visual for Expansive Single “Male Bonding”

With the release of 2018’s full-length debut Youth Hunt, the Dokkum, The Netherlands-based trio The Homesick — Jaap van der Velde, Erik Woudwijk and Elias Elgersma — were quickly typecast as being resident tricksters, shrewdly courting spirituality under their own nonconformist whims. For outsiders, it was hard to tell whether the band was being ironic and taking the piss out of things — or genuinely unraveling themselves as starry-eyed romantics. Interestingly, even the album’s production values were quixotic and highly unusual: Elgersma and Van der Velde’s vocals were drenched in reverb  and paired with warped synths and distorted guitars within hook-driven guitar pop.

Slated for a February 7, 2020 release through Sub Pop Records, the Dutch trio’s forthcoming sophomore album The Big Exercise derives its title from a passage in acclaimed singer/songwriter Scott Walker’s biography Deep Shade Of Blue, the album reportedly is a concentrated effort by the trio to explore the physicality of their music in fresh ways.  “When we were on tour in 2018, I bought Meredith Monk’s Dolmen Music in Switzerland,” Van der Velde says in press notes. “Elias and I have been completely immersed in her music ever since. But also the work of Joan La Barbara for example, who also did things with extended vocal techniques, that was also quite vital to us. We discovered that the human voice offers so many beautiful elements that can still feel very physical and intrusive.”

“That’s also a  phenomenal aspect of the position we’re now in as a band,” Van der Velde adds. “I consider The Homesick a pop band first and foremost. If you’d introduce a late-era Scott Walker-record to a layman, it would likely fall on flat ears. But put it in the right scene of a good movie, and that person may finally understand its potential. The Homesick is allowed to play around in that pop framework, and the goal is to explore what’s possible within it. You can do super radical and weird things, and at the same time convey it all as straightforward pop music. With this album, I hope people will hear things anew after multiple listens.”

Additionally, the album finds the members of The Homesick second-guessing their long-held core chemistry as a live unit, adding baroque instrumentation like piano, acoustic guitar, percussion and clarinet to angular post-punk arrangements. “It’s the opposite of trying to translate recorded music to the stage,” the band’s Elias Elgersma says in press notes. “We were already playing these songs live for quite some time, so for this album, we wanted to unlock the potential of these songs further in the studio.”

Youth Hunt thematically touched upon a quest for belonging, roots and provenance; however, The Homesick’s sophomore album is centered around a headstrong wanderlust, which is fitting for a small-town Dutch band, anxious to take over the world while featuring meditations on family ties, alternate realities and commonplace encounters. Interestingly, the album’s latest single “Male Bonding” is a galloping genre-defying track that possesses elements of angular, Gang of Four-like post-punk, 90s grunge, Devo-like New Wave and hints of psych folk placed within an expansive, breakneck arrangement that’s wildly eccentric yet mosh pit friendly.

Directed by Karlos Rene Ayala and featuring work by Skinner Illustration andMatt Brown 3D Animations, the recently released video is surreal sort of a Dada-esque nightmare that pulsates with the song’s chugging, motorik-like groove.