Christian M.
This music is what you want your cross country drive to California to be narrated by as you wave goodbye to all things loved and lost.
Favorite track: Desert Exile.
If there's a single guiding motif to this debut recording from Love Theme, it's the melancholic throb of love learnt and love lost, a descent that tumbles and slips through the overall feeling of looking back. As intimately and carefully as its parts cohesively lament a narrative, it's the after-image that catches your breath, like a memory morphing as it is observed.
Comprised of Alex Zhang Hungtai of the now defunct project Dirty Beaches, along with Austin Milne, and Simon Frank, 'Love Theme' is arranged from an improvised session with twin saxophones, synthesizer, percussion, drum machine, and voice. Over the course of a year the material was edited remotely from the members' home cities of Montreal, London, LA and Taipei.
The record's sullen ambience is never left too long to set in. The aching wane of the saxophone arrangements frisk the propulsive aggro moments of the mixed percussion, forcing a melancholic halo upon the queasy stupor of the synthetic swing that closes each side of the record. It's a bizarre lust for life that's being divined from equal parts dislocation and invigoration, a potent remedy which perhaps Love Theme can call their own.
Percolating and finding form over time, the record instinctively follows a travel narrative, moving across a series of landscapes, reflecting the innate experiences of the expressions and voices that were first collected in South London back in February 2015.
NORTH AMERICAN TOUR DATES:
14/09/2017 Le Cercle, Quebec, QC
15/09/2017 General Assembly, Ottawa, ON
16/09/2017 Venue TBD, Toronto, ON
17/09/2017 This Ain't Hollywood, Hamilton, ON
18/09/2017 The Empty Botlle, Chicago, IL
19/09/2017 El Club, Detroit, MI
20/09/2017 MOTR, Cincinnati, OH
21/09/2017 The Windup Space, Baltimore, MD
22/09/2017 Philamoca, Philadelphia, PA
23/09/2017 Park Church Co-Op, Brooklyn, NY
25/09/2017 Echoplex, Los Angeles, CA
26/09/2017 Space, San Diego, CA
27/09/2017 Bottom Of The Hill, San Francisco, CA
29/09/2017 The Chapel, Seattle, WA
30/09/2017 Holocene, Portland, OR
Expansive, turbulent electronic music from Reid Willis that imagines the cycles of “creation & destruction, beauty & violence.” Bandcamp New & Notable Dec 6, 2020