WATCH AND SHARE “A BOARDING PASS” MUSIC VIDEO HERE
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NEW LP, PINK OBJECTS, OUT THIS FRIDAY
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Photo Credit : Hanna Negami // DOWNLOAD HIGH-RES
“A Boarding Pass” is the fourth single from the upcoming Treephones — the musical moniker of Stephen Trothen — full-length album Pink Objects, which is available everywhere this Friday.
The song describes an awkward scene at an airport between two people as they wait to board a plane. “Lyrically, I was thinking of airports as these in-between places where people are just anonymous and stuck together. I found myself imagining a scene and writing about two people waiting — having one character engrossed in a book and someone else bored and wasting time on their phone and wondering (and googling) about the people and things around them.”
The new single arrives complete with a video from Trothen that is a screen capture of a computer program that he wrote in the visual coding language Max/MSP. With all of the connections and code in plain view, the program moves randomly through an image sequence of him blowing up a balloon, while also displaying the lyrics and some visual graphs of the audio of the song.
“Since I was going to be busy strumming the guitar with that pink box on my head, I had to figure out exactly how many milliseconds were between each lyric and automate the changes so it could be captured in one take" he explains. “It is kind of in communication with the song in that I scheduled everything, but then I didn’t have any control as it played out.” And why a balloon? "Well, the song is basically about something blowing up in a person's face, so I thought it'd be fun to present the metaphor literally.”
WATCH AND SHARE “A BOARDING PASS” MUSIC VIDEO HERE
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The ten song titles on Treephones’ new album Pink Objects read like an inventory of things found stashed away in a closet or neglected drawer. With every song named after an object, the concept album takes the approach of a short story collection and focuses on the interactions and relationships of characters centred around these items. The album was written and recorded at home by Trothen who also handled all but a few of the performing duties. The result is a set of songs that weave beautifully evolving textures into a carefully arranged sound that matches the directness and understated complexity of its lyrics.
WATCH AND SHARE “FUZZY DREAM MACHINE” HERE
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Pink Objects was mixed by Calvin Hartwick (Daniel Caesar, METZ, Cadence Weapon) at Dream House Studios and mastered by Phil Demetro at Lacquer Channel. The second concept album from Treephones, Pink Objects is a great leap forward for the self-recording Trothen in both songcraft and production, with each of the 10 songs being as full sounding as they are intimate and personal — never getting lost in their own conceptual ambitions as they flow from from one object/song to the next.
Why pink? “I actually came up with the title early on after becoming fixated on all things pink," says Trothen. "Pink is so vibrant and striking it sometimes seems unreal when you see it on a flower or bird. Pink noise is fascinating and nice sounding too. The colour also encodes so much culturally, particularly as it relates to emotions and the body. So for Pink Objects as a title, the colour pink to me suggests a liveliness like it is pulsating with some life-force."
WATCH AND SHARE “A MAP” MUSIC VIDEO HERE
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And why objects? “I read that an object becomes a thing when it stops working for us,” says Trothen. “So, in other words, the object is meant to go unnoticed while serving us in some way, and becomes a thing when it breaks or fails. I was interested in how these terms were being defined according to their relation to humans. I wanted to invert that idea with these songs and describe objects that elicit less controlled effects in us: evoking suppressed thoughts or concerns, memories, or facilitating awkward encounters. I think that’s why a lot of the relationships described in the songs are at a moment when they have stopped working or are in need of repair.”
PRE-ORDER PINK OBJECTS HERE
PINK OBJECTS TRACKLIST
1 Matches
2 Fuzzy Dream Machine
3 Chord Shapes
4 A Swarm of Bees
5 A Watch (Unwind)
6 Seeds
7 A Map
8 The Penny (Obsolete)
9 A Boarding Pass
10 A Photograph