Dollshot, aka Rosie and Noah K., have shared their latest single, "Paradise Flat", today via Soundcloud, prior to its release tomorrow via all digital platforms. The track is featured on the New York City duo's upcoming sophomore album, Lalande, which is set to arrive January 25. West Coast performances, in support, will be announced in the coming weeks.
Discussing the single, the duo stated... "Paradise Flat" is a song of romantic runaways, the brief and intense experience of being intimate strangers. A chance encounter that stretches a moment before it's suddenly lost to time and circumstance.
Dollshot are a group who feel most at home in a state of perpetual dislocation. The husband-and-wife duo of vocalist Rosie and saxophonist Noah are forever hovering between oppositional worlds-physically, musically, and spiritually. She's from a small town in Virginia, and he's from L.A. They both cut their teeth at conservatory (with copious classical compositions, chamber-ensemble commissions, and jazz recordings to their names), but they conceived of Dollshot as an indie-rock outfit where they could bend the rules of their formal training. This is a band than can school you on the microtonal theories of Russian experimental composer Ivan Wyschnegradsky and gush about No Doubt's Tragic Kingdom with equal enthusiasm.
With Lalande, Dollshot peel out for parts unknown, with that enigmatic album title-sourced from Brazilian authorClarice Lispector's 1943 novel, Near to the Wild Heart-serving as the cryptic signpost for the unpredictable journey ahead. Says Noah, "We were both really taken with the idea of this made-up word, 'Lalande,' that's described in the book as this naked feeling of the infinite when you look out at night over the ocean. This album is about a woman who's looking in on herself, and it's ambiguous as to whether or not she's really alive. That's the basic thematic framework: these liminal realms that this girl inhabits."
Lalande resembles a house of mirrors perched on a fault line. Each song plots out a byzantine maze where familiar sounds-from 19th-century German lieds to '70s prog and fusion to '90s post-rock and IDM-are twisted and mutated, and the foundation is constantly shifting underneath. There is great tension in the music that lies in the inherently confrontational relationship between Rosie's pristine, diamond-cut voice and the bull-in-a-china-shop drumming of Mike Pride, who anchors a backing band that also includes bassist Peter Bitenc, keyboardist Wes Matthews, and cellist Kevin McFarland.
But the philosophical impetus for Lalande lies in an unlikely, non-musical collaboration with another friend: Hampton Fancher, the veteran screenwriter who invited Noah and Rosie to take part in his creative process while he was working on his script for Blade Runner 2049. Fancher provided the lyrics to Lalande's most atypical track, "Circulate Stop," a free-associative spoken-word narrative cast against an elegiac piano instrumental and pained sax moans reverberating out in the distance. For Noah, "Circulate Stop" gets at the feeling of the word 'Lalande,' with this delicate but dangerous voice speaking as the music swirls around.
But from the track's ceaseless stream of surrealist imagery, a certain essential truth emerges-one that speaks to the arduous creation of an album that was written in Topanga Canyon but recorded in Brooklyn over the course of three years, and which adapts age-old folkloric traditions for the atomized modern mind while updating the music of the ancients into fearless, futurist avant-rock.
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