Track of the Week: Lilacs and Champagne, "Everywhere, Everyone"
Alex Hall and Emil Amos, the brain trust behind Portland, Oregon's trippy instrumentalists Grails, are taking a new approach for the self-titled debut by their side project Lilacs and Champagne (out 1/31 on the always-reliable Mexican Summer). Armed with a sampler and a stack of old European soundtrack LPs, private-press psych obscurities and found-sound tapes, Hall and Amos stitched together a disorienting but fascinating crazy quilt of spacy modern psychedelia. The press kit describes it as "the sound of Nurse With Wound collaborating with J-Dilla," but you could also throw in Ennio Morricone and My Bloody Valentine.
This self-produced video for lead-off track "Everyone, Everywhere" finds a perfect visual analogue for this derangement-of-the-senses music by gathering clips from various obscure '70s and '80s horror films and layering them with perfectly deployed distortion, tracking errors and other bits of VHS-era visual noise. I'm impressed by how completely off-the-radar these films are: I didn't recognize a single one of them, and I worked in a video store that did a brisk trade in sleazy horror flicks back in college. Can't wait to hear the rest of the album.
| "Everyone, Everywhere" , Lilacs and Champagne | |
|---|---|
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