Glaascats – Send the Letter
The weight of one’s origins, often, is too heavy for normal people to bear. Espcially in this era of grand national villainry, it’s easy and somewhat rational to want to take out your passport and, in the glowing eyes of the world, draw a line right over the place where your citizenship is written up in big bold letters. That will be satisfying, I’m sure. But what next?
What if I told you that there’s a place where it genuinely doesn’t matter where you come from because all people become the same? Too good to be true, I hear you say. What if there’s a place where culture is a successful mash-up of all other cultures that have ever been successful? You still don’t believe me. Well, it won’t help when I tell you that it’s Switzerland.
Those traits are best exemplified by Glaascats a musica project that, if you were asked to decide based on sound alone the geographical location where it was made, you’d never succeed. This is part of the cool, vibrant alternative wave of Swiss music that’s both inspiring and frightening in its undeniable qualities. “Send the Letter” is a strangely potent mix of desert steam alt-rock and shoegaze-obsessed production delivered by some studio hermit. What next? Start learning Romansch and be off!
jasper dean – SUN
People are alone all the time, and it’s horrible. It’s far from being a romantic ideal about sitting alone, looking at one’s life and using all that time to create something gorgeous which speaks the truth about life and reality.
No, all this loneliness is turning people into monsters. All this time spent alone is making ordinary people want to climb up the wall and forcing them into terrible habits that they can’t break. And nothing, not even a couple of years of isolation due to a global medical concern, can make us change paths.
All that’s left is to investigate what can happen. All that someone can do, I suppose, is find the right tone to accompany this new way of retreating from the world. jasper dean has a pretty good idea of what it would sound like.
“SUN” feels like a mixture of all (yes, all!) the alternative music sounds that got popular during the 1990s. It’s poppy, grungy, industrial rock produced like a shoegaze record. It’s the sound of a record collection bleeding through someone’s empty thoughts. And, yes, it’s a very well-designed track.
