Devon Church of Exitmusic Reveals WE ARE INEXTRICABLE Official Video

Exitmusic co-founder Devon Church recently released his debut solo album, We Are Inextricable. The album which follows up follows up Exitmusic's critically acclaimed album The Recognitions, can be ordered now at Bandcamp and is available on streaming services. This Friday Devon Church will kick off a tour with labelmates Chasms in Chicago in support of the release and today he shared the official video for "We Are Inextricable" with Self-Titled Magazine.

Devon explains, "'We Are Inextricable' is a song that explores karma, eternal recurrence, dreams within dreams & dangerous entanglements - a moth's infatuation with a flame." VOIID Studios, creators and directors of the video, give us a look into the concept of the album and how it came about. "The genesis of this video actually started a while back - we were so head over heels in love with Devon's music that we were actually trying to shoot something for him long before the album was even completed. We initially wanted to shoot something for every song. But this particular concept grew out of a conversation about how every once in a while it feels like you're not actively authoring the thing you're creating, but instead just channeling it. This led us to the idea of including the concept of the Muses, these symbols of divine, externalized inspiration whose benevolence and whims you are totally at the mercy of, and all the old tropes about them being called upon when someone is out of ideas, and we hit on this concept and question: what would happen if you called on a Muse, initiated this contact because you wanted something from them, but the Muse, who really has all the power, all the agency, simply turns the tables and wants to take something from you instead?"

It can take years to find your voice. In the case of the Winnipeg-born, Brooklyn-based musician Devon Church, it took the dissolution of a decade-long marriage and creative collaboration (Exitmusic, a nightmare-pop project co-founded by Church's ex-wife) to send him down the road of discovering his own singular, rough-hewn-yet-elegant style.

Exitmusic is known for haunting soundscapes and hair-raising emotional climaxes. With his remarkably assured debut, We Are Inextricable, Church applies his experience as a producer, multi-instrumentalist and songwriter to an equally absorbing solo project-one that plunges his Cohen-esque pop poetics into an ocean of drone, psychedelic minimalism, harmonic noise, and distortion-tinged, angelic ambiance. The result is a well-crafted exploration of samsara and nirvana, heaven and earth, two states seemingly coexisting in the songs themselves. It's an entrancing listen.

Sensuous, surrealist lyrics-touching on themes of romantic obsession, religious ambivalence, dysfunctional families, and the ineffable strangeness of human existence-are delivered in a ravaged, soulful baritone, approximating some chimeric offspring of two-cigarettes-at-once Tom Waits, a tripped-out David Bowie, and John Maus. Trance-inducing, tape-saturated echoes of minimalist and ambient composers like Terry Riley, Pauline Olivera, Steve Reich and Grouper fill the spaces left by post-punkified chord structures, primitive drum machines, shakers, tambourines, and delirious, overdriven synthesizers.

The album opens with "Chamomile," a simple, striking, four-chord dirge with a big hook, somatic synth arpeggios, and strange lyrics suspended in a burnt-out cathedral. Ominously juxtaposed images and impressionism give way to a chorus built around a platitude read from an herbal tea bag. Repurposed for a sarcastic suicide note, the chorus line ("life is for the living and you're meant to be free") takes on multiple layers of meaning and intent, set between verses dripping with tragic irony, biblical references, and bodily fluids. It serves as a prelude to a night-sea journey through the depths of a complex and conflicted psyche, concluding with a brief glimpse of transcendence in the starlit closer "Sky Save For Us."

"Your Father's House," which muses on a family history of addiction and mental illness, is an unexpected dream-pop epic about the struggle to leave the past behind ("and lock the door to your father's house"). We Are Inextricable's title track, with its pulsating synths, ghostly guitars, and powerful vocals, stands out as a stylistic and thematic mission statement. It seems to refer to both human bondage and our common human bond, a song as much about the pathological eternal recurrences of a bad relationship as our karmic and cosmic interconnectedness. What binds us-seen from another point of view-sets us free.

Devon Church Tour Dates

05.24 Chicago, IL @ Empty Bottle ~

05.25 Indianapolis, IN @ Pioneer Indy (Spellbound) ~

05.26 Pittsburgh, PA @ Roboto ~

06.01 Brooklyn, NY @ Elsewhere ~

~ w/ Chasms

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