Talkdemonic’s new album Various Seasides comes out on October 28th, 2022. It is the long-awaited fifth full-length, after eleven years, from Brooklyn based-composer Kevin Timothy O’Connor’s band, in the wake of releases from Arena Rock Recording Co. and Isaac Brock’s label Glacial Pace, and tours with The National, The Flaming Lips, Quasi, The Walkmen, and Modest Mouse. As you play it, you will feel its loving tendrils of melody entering your mind and tenderly provocative rhythms soaking your psyche. With Various Seasides, O’Connor has fervently brought into being a perfect score to resonant pleasure in sound, encouraging steady play in its loving ways of nautical soundscape.
Along with his Talkdemonic releases, O’Connor also wrote music for Universe (2020), the gorgeous feature biopic about jazz trumpeter Wallace Roney, named Best Music Documentary by the International Documentary Association, the world’s most prestigious event dedicated to the documentary genre. He is also known for creating film scores for the environmental documentary Back Water (2020) and the disturbing narrative drama Birds of Neptune (2015), as well as creatively assisting Oscar-nominated composer Johann Johannsson on Darren Aronofsky’s horror film Mother! (2018).
Even before recently becoming uniquely accomplished in the field of film composition, previous albums to Various Seasides had received elegant praise from esteemed markets like Pitchfork, which described 2006’s Beat Romantic’s sound as “a bevy of acoustic elements over modulating, soft-focus synthesizers. .. Many songs don’t make it past two minutes, which results in the album unfolding like a single piece of nearly continuous music. Such unity is a credit to their sense of vision .. the allure isn’t in isolated beauty, but the juxtaposition of so much of it.”
All of the same could easily be said of Various Seasides, but even more-so for its distinguished ingenuity inspiring repeated listening, as it is a both beguiling and sophisticated enough to be played again and again, encompassing atmosphere or more casual appreciation. It is the best thing that Talkdemonic has released so far, bringing O’Connor’s already formidable talents and fresh experiences with crafting his new soundtrack skills into creating a personalized overplus of atmosphere, evoking a resplendently aquatic realm.
In real time, O’Connor himself describes it as “a reference to the shifting, adrift time when the album was recorded late 2020 to mid 2021— when we all felt alone in our heads, time, place, situations, and also a moment when we could all imagine our lives in different realities, where our homes truly were, where we saw our futures.”
There is a paradoxically Empyrean homesickness to tracks like “Dream Silver” which sounds like a far-off alien trying to speak to us about the whole universe with the musical language of recent or nearby popular culture we might understand. There are sweet, panoramic slices of Shostakovich-like brassy-synth blasts in the opening tracks “Barely Dawn” and “Playland”, as well as allographic fantasy merging a vibe of Baudelaire’s green meadows with haunting psychic dilation in “Glass Tower”; and too, the simple yet exotic alterity and fantastical mesmerization of “Night Walk.”
“Various Seasides is a nod to the album being of the water,” O’Connor admits. “Instrumental albums’ meanings should be vague in that it brings the listener to a place or soundtracks a time, or a moment in life that becomes personal to that individual. It shouldn’t be thrust on them. That’s the advantage of no lyrics, no voice, just the feeling of the tune, which can be even more special to the listener or turn them off completely.”
O’Connor played all the instruments on the album, including the drums, bass, acoustic guitars, synths, Wurlitzer piano, and percussion.Various Seasides is thus a return to the band’s beginnings, once again a solo creation sharing its origins with Mutiny Sunshine (2004). “I always meant for Talkdemonic to become my own thing again one day, and this album is the definition of that notion,” he explains. “I’m obviously not objective, but I believe that the album is the most focused to date, in that the instrumentation and sound, is meant to remain in the same room for the entire record. There aren’t any sampled drums, its my drum set from start to finish. The Wurlitzer piano remains the center of most of the songs, and the synthesizers propel us through. It’s meant to be about the ideas and not the stage tricks.” It was also produced, recorded, and mixed by O’Connor at Talknumeric in Brooklyn, New York. Then mastered by Gus Elg at Sky Onion in Portland, OR, with vinyl lacquers cut by Elg as well.
What is the origin story of Various Seasides? O’Connor was coming out of a six-month hermetic experience during the deep Covid days of 2020. “I lost my position at a music house studio in lower Manhattan, where I was composing music for commercials and branded content. Although I was working sporadically on a few films, I decided to see if I still had it in me to write a new Talkdemonic record, as I basically had been giving all of my creative energy to my composer side for years.
“So I rented a small studio space in a completely empty building in Williamsburg right adjacent to the music venue Brooklyn Steel,” he says. ”I started going to the studio everyday in November 2020, to tinker around with musical ideas that had been brewing. I wrote and recorded ‘Dream Silver’ kinda out of nowhere, within the first three days. It was an exhilarating feeling, life affirming to be honest. As I was in a low place, like a lot of people at the time. But I had reconnected with what I cared about most, my own personal music. In a sense, the eight months I spent methodically recording the rest of the record saved my life. I wrote and recorded a new song about every two weeks. What an incredible experience it was.”
While no tour plans have been booked yet, O’Connor has been performing with Vandiver, “playing drums with Andrew Hammond’s neo-folk project (that I also produced a few tracks for their What May Rot EP).” If Talkdemonic does return to the road, think of artists like Beach House and Cate LeBon as perfect ways to complement the bill, soaking in its similarly uncanny dimensions of bittersweet recognition and explicit embrace of the universally alien. It really is a wonderful way to drown and breathe at the same time.
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