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Feb 09, 2022 By Caleb Campbell Photography by Eleanor Petry

Today longtime indie rock musician, songwriter, and producer John Vanderslice has announced his latest project, ORANGEPURPLEBEACH. Vanderslice first built his name as a producer on a fastidious devotion to hi-fi analog recording, producing records for Death Cab for Cutie, Spoon, Deerhoof, The Magnetic Fields, and The Mountain Goats. Created in the aftermath of the closing of Tiny Telephone San Francisco, his move to Los Angeles, and the pandemic, ORANGEPURPLEBEACH represents an inevitable change for Vanderslice.

With his upcoming album and film, d E A T h ~ b U g, Vanderslice is sharing his first full-length dive into the world of electronica and digital recording. Embracing glitchy hip hop textures, deconstructed electronica, and stuttering rhythms, the record is one of Vanderslice’s most exploratory works yet, while still retaining the craftsmanlike quality of his analog recordings. Vanderslice explains of the new album, “I’m interested in making more abstract and surreal music, and I want to recede as the narrator and face of my own music.”

The full album is due out April 8th of this year, but accompanying the announcement Vanderslice has also shared a new single, “Pylon Shadow,” which you can listen to below.

“Pylon Shadow” explores the surreal and ephemeral boundaries of Vanderslice’s new sound. Vanderslice’s vocals melt into a thick haze of stuttering synth beats and fluttering electronic elements. Rather than the focal point of the track, Vanderslice is another voice within the chaos, a detachted specter floating through the track’s otherworldly soundscape. Meanwhile, the accompanying video is the first of an accompanying 12-part part film, directed by Serena Hughes and Sammy Lamb. The video is just as distorted as the instrumental, crafting a fractured digital facsimile of the natural world.

The album release also coincides with a new podcast with Vanderslice, produced by TrueAnon, that details the rise and fall of Vanderslice’s Tiny Telephone studios, and explores the precarious nature of pursuing a career in art. Episodes 1 & 2 are available now.

Check out the song and video below. d E A T h ~ b U g is due out everywhere on April 8th.