Ah, how quickly we forget how slowly we remember. Years-in-review might serve to mitigate a general lack of mindfulness in an era of streaming ephmerality, but how much and for how long? Questions of retention abound not only media discourse but The Club. Worlds removed from royalty negotiations, decades before recognition algorithms, DJs doodled over record label stickers, foreshadowing the ubiquitous ambiguity that now walks hand-in-hand with anonymity’s ghost…or maybe it’s more the case of a handcuffed corpse being dragged.
All of which is to say: Memory Keepers.
The Austin duo, a side project of Jared Boulanger and Amarah Ulghani from The Sour Notes, is gearing up to issue a new 7-inch EP…sometime early next year. Though we don’t have a release date or title for it yet, we hear it was mixed in Houston by Steve Christensen (Khruangbin) and mastered in NYC by Heba Kadry (Bjork, Slowdive). Also, perhaps even better than names and dates, we have the first single! And it’s — dare we say? — familiar.
“As we were writing our first batch of songs to perform live, we ended up needing a few extra minutes to keep the party going,” says Boulanger. “We thought Eno’s ‘Third Uncle’ was the perfect fit for us to cover, it being a very danceable punk-fusion that worked well with our instrumentation,” i.e. guitar, synths, looper, vocoder, drum machine, sampler, etc. “What hasn’t been said about this song?” Boulanger continues: “We spun it around with more pulsing synthesizers and vocoder, in lieu of wild guitars from the original. It’s funny to hear people come up to us after the show and say they really liked that Bauhaus song.”
Funny indeed. Austinites can catch Memory Keepers at either or both of the dates below, and everybody can enjoy their take on Brian Eno’s “Third Uncle” right here.
Memory Keepers live:
12.13.18 - Austin, TX - Barracuda
01.01.19 - Austin, TX - Volstead Lounge