Have you ever had a dream where the logic doesn’t make sense? Where the tape’s all runny and scenery loops on a repeat like an old Scooby Doo episode only no one realizes it and the bad guys are gaining on us, but we can’t catch our breath or rationalize changing directions or even hiding for a little bit! Ghost Orchard is like that, only with a pinch of proprioceptive melancholia slithering beneath a sauna of warm analog steam and thick head of hair. The project is the work of 18-year-old singer-songwriter/tape collage-er Sam Hall, who’s bedroom musings have found footing on Orchid Tapes, the cassette label responsible for Coma Cinema’s Posthumous Release and Alex G’s DSU. The album, as every good album seems to, chronicles “depression and high school and balancing that with feelings of love and confusion and the anxiety of the aftermath,” and blankets some probably sharp lyrics in quilt of gentle fuzz. Sam Ray’s influence from the Orchid Tapes-affiliated acts Teen Suicide/Julia Brown/Ricky Eat Acid feels immeasurably present, both in the fact that the songs are often built around acoustic guitars in open tunings/Casio SK-1/5s recorded directly to tape and in that they embrace a similar shimmering melancholic burnout.
“Separate” and “Sleepover” embrace a mode of slow-moving MIDI-country that funnels something akin to the Ocarina of Time “Lon Lon Ranch” theme through limp keyboard jangle in three-quarter time, while “Lavender” and “October 2013” fit a more conventional pop songwriting. Hall’s voice is an uncanny match for Radiator Hospital’s Sam Cook-Parrott, who’s Philadelphian yawp and slippery use of language further rattles your windows and soon shakes your halls with dense arrangements, blurred through a hazy skylight of cassette hypnogogia. In a way, it’s starting to feel like all these bedroom Bandcamp back-catalogers are moving out onto their own terrain, each moment another step further onto experimental ice than before. After Katie Dey’s phenomenal asdfasdf, the site’s grown into its own lineage, with more and more absurd laptop experimentation growing out of the bubble than ever before. Labels like Orchid Tapes are ushering the democracy of art-pop into a new era and if this is any indication of where things are going, I’d say things look pretty bright.
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