BROOKLYN | AUGUST 18, 2023: Brooklyn indie-rock artist Isaiah Singer releases “Volcanoes” on all streaming platforms on Friday, August 18th, a trippy, psychedelic indie rock single filled with everything you would expect from an artist who grew up immersed in SF Bay Area 1960s counterculture flashbacks. “Volcanoes” is an ode to the subsiding panic and intense clarity of the latter half of a precarious acid trip, with the artist drawing inspiration from the likes of Donovan’s Hurdy-Gurdy Man and The Velvet Underground’s self-titled album. Atmospheric guitars, mesmerizing organ, and haunting vocals provide a spacious bed for lyrics about the glow of intense but distant love.
Songwriter, guitarist, and vocalist Isaiah Singer creates a heavy yet floating song with lyrics of hallucinogenic imagery, especially the anthemic chorus which takes us on the ultimate mind trip:
You took a hammer to the bells
And kept them ringing until they fell down
All the way down
Touched down
All the way down
You remember the night
The artist further adds:
“This was one of the first songs we worked on for the album. Basic tracks were recorded in lockdown, but the vibe of the song was set when it was first written, in band rehearsals a few years prior. The overall feeling of the song never changed, even as the sound became more defined and lyrics evolved over time, so everything we did in the studio felt organic.
Structurally, the song hinges on this long pause going into the solo. The drummer, Mike Lunoe, popped a Vibraslap hit there which was a great punctuation but felt a bit too comical. My producer Mike Abiuso crushed it into this weird ASMR effect that sort of crawls around your head for a dissociative effect that suits the song brilliantly.
Because it’s so mellow and thematically peculiar, “Volcanoes” was not an obvious contender for a single release, but ultimately it’s become one of my favorite tracks and I’m really excited to share it.”
ABOUT: Isaiah Singer grew up surrounded by music: he passed the hat at the cable car turnaround at Ghirardelli Square while his father played the concertina on a slack rope; his mother ran the children’s choir. His early projects included solo folk recordings with harmonica and acoustic guitar, attending open mics around the SF Bay Area. Fast forward to New York in his 20s, where he found himself playing with Genesis P-Orridge in Psychic TV. Later bands included incendiary garage punk rockers Snatch Attack and the chamber-punk trio (sometimes octet) Freedom Haters, who played one of the last shows at CBGB before it fell victim to the ravages of fashion. Over the past ten years, Singer has been collaborating with composer/violinist Sean Hagerty and the Third Rail Projects theater company on shows including the ground-breaking off-Broadway immersive hit “Then She Fell” and “Ghost Light” at Lincoln Center. Recent sync film credits include “Numbers on the Door” which appears in the experimental film “The Night Garden” presently making the rounds of film festivals with Best Experimental Short Film awards from the Roma, London, Toronto, and Tokyo Film Festivals, to name a few.
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