Destroyer "Dan’s Boogie"
Sacred Paws "Jump Into Life"
The Taxpayers "Circle Breaker"
Welcome to Circle Breaker, the new Taxpayers album.
As I write this, it has been nearly a decade since the release of Big Delusion Factory, the last one.
Think of it! How much the world has changed since the summer of 2016:
A global pandemic, a Trump presidency, countless wars, Me Too, Black Lives Matter, Artificial Intelligence, various climate catastrophes, the overturning of Roe v Wade. That’s just off the top of my head.
What a wild ride this decade has been.
And so much has changed for me, personally. 2016 was the year I got sober. I got married in 2019. I watched friends and family get married, commit suicide, start businesses, start families, get murdered. I moved across the country, from the hurricanes of Louisiana to the blizzards of Minnesota. I became a father.
And amid all these occasions of joy and tragedy and heartbreak and love and loss, I find myself wondering what I have learned, and what I will tell my son when he inevitably tells me that he is scared and confused by this world that he has been brought into.
Why do these things happen?
What is the point of it all?
Not long after we began working on this album, amid a week of turmoil, Andrew texted me a photo he had taken of a tree stump.
In the previous week, his friend’s child, a young adult who he had watched grow up and shared a home with, had been gunned down and murdered over a dispute at a park a few blocks away. In the following day of horror, as friends and family began to gather at their home to hold each other and mourn, a chainsaw began to roar, shaking the windows and drowning out the grief. A cherry tree that stood on city property in front of their house had grown roots which were breaking the concrete sidewalk, and it was now being cut down by workers in hard hats. And they were doing a bad job of it. They hacked and hacked away at it until nothing but a mangled stump remained. It was terrible and surreal, he told me, on a day that was already terrible and surreal.
But life begrudgingly continued for those that remained. They ate meals, ran errands, tried to get work done when they could. And then one day, not long after, as Andrew was walking back home, he noticed something on the mangled stump of the old tree in front of his house: new growth. Tiny little branches with buds forming into leaves.
A new tree being born from the old.
Whether there is purpose written into the chaos of each day is probably beside the point: when the day is done, another will begin, and so on. The purpose, if we choose to make one up, is entirely dependent on us.
As often as life unfolds into wonder and beauty, it also becomes cold and hard, and in the complexity of the modern world it may seem like right and wrong are beginning to blur. But when life is confusing and horrible, and when the path forward is obscured, here is what I will tell my son:
It is always right to be kind.
It is always right to seek to be better.
It is always right to confront cruelty and to oppose violence.
We are here to help each other.
We are here to understand each other.
We are here to learn how to love each other.
And that, I will tell him, is what being punk as fuck is all about.
Hope you enjoy the new album,
Rob Taxpayer
Haroula Rose & Oliver Hill "Cycles"
The world of Cycles is supine and aquatic. Sounds echo within sounds, which encircle melodies like small creatures gathering. As both a record and a series of short films, Haroula Rose & Oliver Hill have created a friendly, multi-faceted planéte sauvage.
Written & recorded in one torrentially rainy week at home in Los Angeles, the music explores the acoustics of the tactile world – sounds coarse and smooth, heavy and light, the smell of wet terrain after a long drought, a long deep breath coming up from dark water to the surface. Cycles presents earthy, bubbling spaces which are womblike and nourishing – not surprisingly, Cycles was conceived and completed in tandem with the birth of their first child.
Instruments were splayed on the rug and a set of creative constraints were put into place: no words, no drums, no guitars, yes dynamics, yes field recordings around the house, yes fades and slowly overlapping layers. And of course, bells. The result is a series of mercurial and cinematic scene changes – stepping through doors, popping out windows, crossing into and out of interior and exterior settings.
Haroula & Oliver bring together dovetailing artistic histories across media – as a filmmaker, Haroula’s feature directorial debut Once Upon a River went to over 40 festivals internationally taking home 19 awards, and her sophomore feature All Happy Families, starring Josh Radnor and executive produced by Michael Shannon, saw a theatrical release in AMCs last fall. Oliver wrote the score and original songs – that soundtrack will be released later this year.
Oliver has written string arrangements for artists such as Magdalena Bay, Dirty Projectors, Helado Negro, and Broken Bells, and has released critically acclaimed records with his bands Pavo Pavo (“quietly poetic … exploring the stuff of life, love, and loss with a clear head,” Pitchfork) and Coco (“bold, striking pop that seems to be filtered in from another dimension,” CLASH.)
Haroula & Oliver’s accompanying films move through a variety of animation techniques, from the maternal figure that floats through the air in Swarm, to the morphing psychedelia of Humanist and the abstracted sonograms of Elemental – what wraps all these elements together is a sense of birth and regeneration.
The charcoal artwork and vinyl packaging was made by Haroula & Oliver the same week as recording. Please enjoy the record in headphones or however will most immerse you in its three-dimensionality.