Michael Beach Shares New Video 'Metaphysical Dice'

Australian singer/songwriter Michael Beach has joined efforts with filmmaker Sophia Mero for his new video "Metaphysical Dice" off his new album Dream Violence. The video debuted with Under The Radar who describe "its own sonic landscapes are similarly shifting, creating a sound that lands between meticulous craftsmanship and a hazy reverie." The video, "conjures similarly bizarre imagery, seemingly envisioning a foretold apocalypse."

Beach explains, "I feel very fortunate to have worked with Sophia Mero on the 'Metaphysical Dice' video--her films have an familiarity and lack of pretense that I love, and have a brilliant way of communicating meaning both subtly and overtly."

"With this song, I wanted to transmit a feeling more than any sort of 'meaning', and the film clip manages to elevate that feeling perfectly. Under our recent political and social order, so much of the world felt a sense of doom, helplessness, and a mysterious questioning of the fate of humanity. Sophia's video has foreboding mystics, bags of money among bags of trash, rats as sole survivors, comets headed for the Bay Area...she nailed it once again!"

Known for his work touring with the eccentric Israeli guitarist Charlie Megira and Australian guitar-pop band Thigh Master, Beach strives to convey both passion and compassion, energy and action. "My hope is that something gets communicated that makes people think outside of themselves or their surroundings," he says. "To ask questions, and consider the effects of their decisions. To communicate some essential part of the human spirit that understands intuitively how to feel connected to each other rather than divide, exploit, separate, ignore, and all the other heinous s we have the ability to do with each other."

Recorded on two continents, Dream Violence documents Beach's move from Oakland, California to Melbourne, Australia as he navigated a new music scene, plenty of bureaucratic red tape, and, ultimately, citizenship. Parts of the album were recorded and mixed at Tiny Telephone Recording in Oakland, at the end of a 2019 tour with Kelley Stoltz producing. Other tracks were recorded at Beach's new home in Melbourne, where he worked with Matthew Ford and Innez Tulloch of Thigh Master, with Peter Warden on drums, to capture an off-the-cuff feel.

Dream Violence unfolds like a revelation, filled with sonic tumbleweeds that reference Neil Young's On the Beach, Bruce Springsteen's Nebraska, the Velvet Underground's Loaded, and the Go Betweens' Before Hollywood. Influences ranging from the enigmatic outlier Megira to Glenn Branca to the Oblivians are combined to create a new, exhilarating sound, part of the path that Beach has been on since 2008's Blood Courses. A veteran of year-end indie rock round ups beginning with Golden Theft in 2013 and continuing with Gravity/Repulsion, released in 2017, Beach distills the best of those early albums and adds sharpened intent.

Dream Violence is available now via Goner Records in North America and on Poison City Records in Australia and New Zealand.

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