Color Tongue
Bushwick pop experimentalists Color Tongue recorded the follow-up to their debut album Sprouts, presenting us with the world premiere of their visual EP Us and the Bugs brought to perceptive life by William Kelleher. The group’s four horsemen of the psychotropic frontiers George Miata, Eddie Kuspiel, Ray McGale & Kevin Urvalek emerged from their Brooklyn apartment of quixotic musical & artistic curios to a rural farmhouse away from the hustle & bustle of NYC. It was out here in this tranquil environment where the band’s focuses were spent concentrated on creating an EP over the duration of four days with the goal to channel & translate their environment through the application & aesthetic that only sound itself can afford & convey. The nearly 14 minute journey that awaits the senses was described by Color Tongue with the following thoughts on the visual/audio work’s stream of inspired consciousnesses:
Us and the Bugs is an exploration of environment, a stew of samples, it’s equal parts polygon and polyrhythm. The 14 minute visual album is built on a bed of samples, everything from sewer drains, to Emus, to airplane engines, to dog dreams. Each track seems to gurgle to life then reside back into the soup, as the next emerges. The sights and sounds are quilted together in the same fashion, a mishmash of small pieces that form together to make something new. It begins and ends with the jangling wind chimes. Comes and goes like a gentle breeze, a brief moment in time.
Color Tongue takes you directly to the heart of their creative zone, from their wild Bushwick digs to the rural farmland that saw the conception & realization of their forthcoming EP take full form. Us and the Bugs begins with visions of DIY spoon-bell windchimes, trickling brooks, caterpillars on the crawl, to animated content bullfrogs lounging upon a lily pad as the Color Tongue sound enter into the audio picture. From found sound dalliances to introductory rhythms & vocal echoes, a harmonic cadence is emitted like the song of trees & water-logged reeds that sends the listener/viewer through psychotropic vision-scapes of forests, mountains & lakes that appear like materialized objects manufactured from the depths of the unconscious theater in full free-play mode. From the cabin essence of creature & critter comforts that emerge from the earth & woodwork in time to the buzzing keys & robust effects that surround the audience; Color Tongue cracks the cuckoo-clock cogs to depict a natural & electric order of ecosystems & realities felt from the group’s cosmic pop choruses that join the world of bugs & beasts from hibernating hyenas to the secret lives of gnome & campfires that send smoke signals out to the eternity expanses of the star-strewn galaxies.
From vast desert landscapes to aquarium observations of underwater sea life; Color Tongue’s visuals for Us and the Bugs allows the audience to enter an in-between zone where their sound thrives in a mixed-media frontier of film, found footage, anachronistic animation & more that fits the group’s field recordings & all the components that comprise the group’s holistic & heady sound. Everything from upbeat hedonistic sounds to calm tranquil swims to oceanic depths bring about elements of water, fire, rain drops on window lenses among appearances from dancers & more that makes for a pagan-like ritual where end brings you back to the beginning with an ambient hum of tones & those DIY spoon chimes that brings the entire experience to an eye & mind opening close. By the end of witnessing the wonders gifted by Color Tongue & visual artist William Kelleher; you too might feel a newfound kinship with fellow insects & items of the natural order that permeates throughout Us and the Bugs:
Color Tongue talked to us about the making of Us and the Bugs:
Tell us about the jump from the debut Sprouts to the forthcoming follow-up, that has seen you all composing & directing the 14 minute audio/visual epic Us and the Bugs.
Sprouts was kind of chaotic in the sense it felt almost like a compilation album to me. Every song sounded different, like a Ween album, which is great in it’s own way.
We wanted Us and the Bugs to be the opposite. We wanted it to all sound like one long song with the same attitude and feeling the whole time. The entire video came from our friend Will Kelleher’s big weird and beautiful brain.
Tell us more about creating this mighty composition, “Us and the Bugs”, and what challenges & breakthroughs you all encountered.
Writing Us and the Bugs was extremely liberating. None of this was premeditated, so that alleviated any expectation of how we wanted it to sound. When you write a song, you hear an entire Phil Spector wall of sound recording in your head. You think you wrote the next Pet Sounds, and when you finally get around to recording it, you’re inevitably let down with the final product because you ran out of money, time or enthusiasm. For this project, George and I gave ourselves four days, and no matter what, the final product was what it was. So I thought it sounded exactly the way I pictured it, for once. I realize that seems depressing but I couldn’t be happier about it.
What’s good & inspiring in Brooklyn right now?
Female fronted bands without a doubt. Everything feels a little louder and angry lately too, it’s great.
Tell us too about the praxis involved with the challenge of making an EP in four days over this past summer in a farmhouse.
It was honestly effortless. George and I would seamlessly tag in and out of adding to the songs and if we hit a wall we’d go into this beautiful green yard, find an animal, put a microphone up to it and we’d add it to the song. That or George would bang a stick against a well or sewer, and it was some how exactly what the song needed. The hardest part was getting our dog Thunder to stop moving around and rattling his collar. We gave up, you hear it on the whole thing.
Other artists, authors & activisms that have blown your minds as of late?
Nai Palm, Brian Eno, Avey Tare and Geologist.
What else can we expect from the upcoming release arrive in early 2018?
We just recorded three songs in Studio G with Jack Counce from Fat Heaven. Really excited about those. Should be out spring or summer of 2018.
Winter plans & wishes?
I’d like to spend the next few months writing new songs.
“Us and the Bugs” song cycle lyrics:
Legs rooted to the tree
I need to get away from
Reach into the breeze,
so close that I can taste em
I found my company,
feasting near the leg bone
foreign fingers feel
and try to pry away from.
–
A savage day, for a play outside
The wild comes to us
the creatures come alive
Giant bird, released its innards.
the chickens ate it up.
we all laughed
Pick up sticks, they never felt like this
the water can pour from the sky
no one would care on a day so fair
even if we all just died
–
Tonight,
the slide the swing
to fight each bolt to bring
to light
each memory
to spite
each vowel, carved into my legs
my legs
–
It tastes fine
waste no mind
flavours are
gifts for tongues
It takes time
to get it right
weathered toys
still have fun
Trees can scream
paper dreams
a ruined roof
can be so cruel
Skin can leak
walls can speak
a patient watch
saves the fool
