This morning The Line of Best Fit premiered ‘I’m Hungry’, the lead track from Jr. Sea’s debut release, Learning To Vanish - an 8-track cassette tape limited to just 50 copies, released 7th April via Tough Love. Learning To Vanish was produced and recorded entirely by Jr. Sea, and then mixed by Tarek Musa.

Jr. Sea writes, records and produces music in a room near Sevilla. Pictures of Lee Hazlewood, unsettling sunsetting ocean-scapes, Tammy Lynn Leppert and Calvin Harris are tacked to the walls. His first interface with the world is Learning To Vanish, which absorbs eight tracks from a constantly expanding catalogue of fuzzed weirdo tensewave; homemade pop with hi-fi ambitions, waving a fist at the sun, and everything else.

Pre-order the limited edition tape (50 copies) w/ free download HERE.

Tracklisting
1. Woke Up Backwards
2. I’m Hungry
3. Holiday From Pain
4. Drowned In Paradise
5. Out of Body Auto-Reply
6. Horror of Home
7. Be Good
8. Weather System Yawning

More Jr. Sea:
www.learningtovanish.tumblr.com
www.facebook.com/jrsea

Pre-order the limited edition LP here

&&& CALL IT A PROCESS &&&

This record doesn’t exactly go down easy. Not that it’s misanthropic. Far from it. The first track says it all: YVETTE are pure pleasure. Loud and live and just bizarre. Some songs sound like the end of days, others like spells and sacrifices. It’s hard to imagine the people making this music as actual human beings with day jobs and girlfriends and health insurance. Frankly it’s hard to think or do much of anything when this record is on. The music has a way of throttling you, pinning you down, really scaring the shit out of you. Good stuff.

We are in the midst of an unfortunate Music As Term Paper era, where experimental artists don’t write music so much as theories about music. Some of that stuff is passable in a ‘sounds good drunk at a museum’ kind of way. But it’s a drag to listen to, never that rewarding to think about, and the worst kind of exclusive. Without the theory, you can’t hear their song…

YVETTE take the opposite approach. The music is not anti-intellectual, but given their emphasis on the physical, I’d say it’s anti-intellectualizing. You don’t need a theory to get this record. If anything, you need to be deprogrammed. A lot of these songs strike me as doing just that – trying to teach us how to get past our own bullshit. To forget how to listen, to remember how to hear. Move through the signifiers, the context, the endless referentiality. Melt us to the core until all we feel is the thing itself.

And so we get a song like “Attrition.” On one hand, it’s the most straightforward thing on the record. On the other, the song doesn’t feel built up so much cut in half – bones and nerves and ventricles all firing in plain sight. Like one of those human anatomy sculptures, you experience all layers, all at once. You could say YVETTE have a way of taking you out of your own skull, but if only for the sake of tidy metaphor, let’s go with the converse: YVETTE never want you to forget you are a body.

These are songs, to be sure – just not songs you merely listen to. Your entertainment is a by-product of some hidden spiritual agenda. Here I go again with the voodoo stuff. Maybe it’s because it’s all so elemental – the pummeling toms (“Carbon Copy”), the three-note cherub melody that morphs with every repetition (“Everything In Reverse”), the painful blasts of feedback (“Tempered Glass”) and sub-bass (“Absolutes”) – but these songs really do something to you. They really shake you up.

For all this talk of getting back to nature, I owe you an admission: We didn’t exactly shit this one out. The band and I recorded live in a converted auto garage, with cranky wiring and bad isolation and no chance whatsoever this would sound like a studio record. It was a cursed space, and what I witnessed those weekends was nothing short of a seance. (If you listen closely, you can hear the fallen hum.) Most songs went through eleven or twelve rounds of remixing, never to build up but to break down, to get the sound rawer, to rid the music of any and all deliberation. Call it a process, he says!

This record took over our lives for many months – the first thing we thought about when we woke up, the last thing we thought about before we went to sleep. We will not profit off this record, most people will not hear it, and of those who do, many will not like it. We could protect our egos with visions of life after death, but that’s the worst kind of hubris. The night before we turned in final mixes, I just had to know. “Why did we do this?” I asked Noah. “What are we doing?”

He couldn’t tell me. Neither could I. But such is the privilege of being a servant – of humbling ourselves before a vision much bigger than either of us realized.

-Nick Sylvester

YVETTE:
Noah Kardos-Fein: guitar, vocals, electronics
Dale Eisinger: drums, electronics
PROCESS:
Recorded at Silent Barn, Brooklyn, NY
Mixed at Sound City, Brooklyn NY
Mastered by Sarah Register at The Lodge, New York NY
Produced by Nick Sylvester