Mirror Talk
You’re young and you embark routinely on these labored, epic train rides across boroughs, testing the seams of your Jansport with blank cassettes, bound for uncle’s. You tape LPs from New Order, Prince, and Bowie. At home, Mom & Dad alternate musical selections, Al Green, then Zeppelin. Sam Cooke, then The Beatles. Deposit your newly copied tapes into shoeboxes. Blink and you’re a high school senior. New York in the early oughts reclaims disco, house and electro, imbuing these modes with a distinctly punk rock hue. Young wallflowers and budding music nerds are coaxed to cease habitual nose-thumbing and general wet-blanket behavior. They begin to dance.
Inspired, you borrow two synthesizers from parents’ Christian-rock band. Start a band of your own. Attract the interest of a producer with a name and manager who manages several of your heroes. Leave college and set up shop in Los Angeles. Indulge endlessly, perform ferociously and frequently. Get offered a modest deal with an immodestly large record company. Discover that well-intentioned handshakes and agreements that had taken place early in the life of the group had become shackles. The resultant music grows bloodless and the band withers.
You move back in with your parents. Join a panel of indie-ish wirehangers who bartered Polo gooses for old leather and acid washed denim, dragging drunken, romantic bones about places you know, holding court with skinny, spectacled, smart-haircut pixies over Jameson and bathroom-coke. Weekend warrior Don Quixote-ing to a soundtrack of Animal Collective, Hot Chip, The-Dream and Diplo.
While at your parents house, by chance of luck, you rediscover the old shoe box containing the decaying magnetic ephemera of your earliest musical loves. The low-bias tapes of Movement, Sign ‘O The Times, and Heroes that you’d copied so long ago, all faded and gently distorted. This collection of sounds becomes your conceptual skeleton. You reunite with old friends. Unite with producer Tony Hoffer, (M83, Beck, Depeche Mode) and together, endeavor to imagine what music might bridge your past and your future.