Crown Heights’ dream pop collective Analog Candle is preparing to release their debut EP on February 3rd. Their song “Trier” gives you a glimpse inside what’s to come, with beautiful – albeit unamused – lyrics, and a lightweight assembly of instrumentals.
Band member Callum is particularly interested in surrealist literature, and thus has created a playlist of sorts for us based on some of his favorite authors. Below, you can browse ten of his favorite titles paired with music he would set as the backdrop to the story lines. It definitely gives you something to ponder heading into the weekend!
The Last To Remain / Pandatone & Julianna Barwick
The Woman In The Dunes / Kobo Abe
Everyday, the two main characters in The Woman in the Dunes have one Sisyphean task – shovel sand that pours into the gigantic desert pit in which they live. With looping harmonies and glitchy textures,The Last To Remain captures the very essence of that mundane, lonely task – in many ways a metaphor for various elements of modern human life.
Time Passes In a Slow Sundown / Geotic
Datura / Lena Crohn
Geotic is a side-project of the musician Baths, and Time Passes In a Slow Sundown pristinely encapsulates the surreal and ever-morphing reality of The Narrator (the main character in Datura,) who starts taking poisionous Datura seeds daily in an attempt to help alleviate her asthma.
Hallmark / Broken Social Scene
Cloud Atlas / David Mitchell
Cloud Atlas is one of the most experimental and masterful books in decades, and almost impossible to summarize in one sentence. The expansive Hallmark, an early Broken Social Scene track, captures the book’s expansiveness and its underlying mindset – an individual slowly growing through many different iterations over time.
Blame It On The Tetons / Modest Mouse
Post Office by Charles Bukowski
The debut novel from Bukowski, Post Office details the author’s many years working in the US postal service and his drunken antics. Modest Mouse (who also have a track titled Bukowski from the same album,) summon one major element of the book with Blame It On The Tetons – its resounding poignancy (common in most of his works) and one that we can all associate with.
Unrequited Love / Lykke Li
Stoner / John Williams
In this American literary masterpiece, William Stoner has two passions throughout his entire life – the pursuit of collegiate knowledge and true human connection. Unrequited Love, a lush, heartbreaking song from Lykke Li, succinctly captures his successes and failures in both.
4 Minute Warning / Radiohead
Dhalgren / Samuel Delaney
4 Minute Warning, a B-side from Radiohead’s In Rainbows, is perhaps one of the most beautiful songs written about an apocalypse of all time. And a similar disaster has occurred in Bellona as well, (the city featured in Dhalgren) but nobody knows what is was (or will ever know.) Two very well-matched works of art – both surreal, mysterious, and quite unsettling.
Neon Bible / Arcade Fire
Amerika / Franz Kafka
So far, 2007’s Neon Bible seems vastly more relevant in 2016 and 2017. Although the song is a discussion on a real America, Kafka’s unfinished first novel Amerika, is a discussion on an alternative-universe America, created from the author’s imagination and research (he had never visited before.) In a surreal and direct manner, both works approach the many types of unique American fears – ‘A vial of hope and a vial of pain’ (lyrics from Neon Bible.)
Nebula / Julianna Barwick
Radiance: A Novel / Catherine M. Valente
In Radiance: A Novel, Severin travels the universe making documentaries with her film crew, until they finally settle on a strange Venus colony, and subsequently never complete their final documentary. Nebula, from Julianna Barwick’s newest record, is the perfect soundtrack to the film crew’s awe-inspiring, solitary journey across the stars.
I can hear the heart breaking as one / Ricky Eat Acid
I’ll Be Right There / Kyung-Sook Shin
I can hear the heart breaking as one summons nostalgia from its opening bars, and the looped vocal samples later on create a thoughtful, subtly heartbreaking texture. The journey of Jung Yong inI’ll Be Right There across somber memories and the current political unrest in 1980’s South Korea, tells an identical story.
Aging Places, Losing Faces / Kevin Drew
Sputnik Sweetheart by Haruki Murakami
Sputnik Sweetheart is surrealist writer Murakami at his finest – an insightful story into human loneliness. Kevin Drew, the frontman of Broken Social Scene, captures an essence of wistful elegance with this track – similarly awash with the same underlying sense of philosophic sadness as the book.
___
Winter ’15 is out February 3rd. It is available for preorder now.
