Week in Pop: Boy Romeo, Crown Larks, Sun Glitters

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Pioneer 11

Presenting a listen & look from LA's own Pioneer 11; press photo courtesy of the artists.
Presenting a listen & look from LA’s own Pioneering 11; press photo courtesy of the artists.

LA duo Pioneer 11 dropped the video for “Grumpy Goomba” from the forthcoming album debut album Gravitorium available later this year via the imprint POW Recordings (Natia, Jordan Raf, Chester Watson, etc). The two-piece of Alex Hastings & Bryan Gomez cut their teeth on the Phosphorus Philosophershas EP produced by London legend Paul White (producer to stars & our personal champions Danny Brown, Open Mike Eagle, etc) & having covered Mark Morrison’s eternal (and recently celebrating it’s twenty-first birthday) “Return of the Mack“, today return with a entrancing vintage television collage visual mashup to match their sound where understated psychedelic tones point toward the most ecstatic painted pictures of sound.
Maybe it is something in that guitar tone, where echo-waves egg on a wealth of effect-laden textures that will send your mind & nerves into all sorts of super-chill sectors. Performance art visuals are met with those late cable analog frequencies that sometimes sneak in beyond the DTV status-quo. Here old freak shows, stock-footage & suspense thrillers run on screen with silhouettes of the group grooving in a way that will inspire anyone to get up from the dumps & out of being a grump. Pioneer 11 themselves presented us with the following exclusive album composition insights courtesy of Alex & Bryan:

Gravitorium is an album that’s been in the works for almost two years now. Our approach to creating these songs has been to focus on using live loops, driven by guitar and bass melodies, to sketch out beats and synth parts. We’ll generate hours worth of content, but find only about 5-10% is the really good stuff worth building into songs. We write, record, and mix everything ourselves, so when it gets to your ears, it’s as personal of a message as we can make. At a time when so much music is created using entirely digital components, we wanted to keep the core of our sound analog, something we know has stood the test of time.