Futuresoundstemporary tell us about Salem
Down alley-ways and past the broken windows of factories long ago used, through streets dark with the night and carried on in the howling wind, an august noise permeates the spaces of the unconscious mind…
Along curb-sides blackened by exhaust fumes and asphalt emblazoned with white, and then into a corridor of false light released by the statues of the dead, casting their gaze on the same spot from eight ’til eight every single night, a noise is found. A noise is found reverberating through the walls and through the reinforced structures reaching their long noses out to the stars, and in the dust left for the morning sweepers, and in the leaves loosening from their binds, an august noise permeates in between spaces. It does so willingly, abstractly, wonderfully. It appears and disappears, causing flushes in the brain as you work hard to connect the nervous impulses, joining the dots with a marker, tracing the lines as old as those buried in your skin. You have forgotten, but the sound remains.
In this life there is such a creation as of true feeling devised by haphazard men and women pushing the boundaries away in the name of artistic sentiment. Forgers as old as time, locked away in isolation with only their white screens for company, creating, programming, inventing. The witches of SALEM are such creators, harnessing the will of the universe and channeling it straight at us.
I imagine SALEM seeing and feeling everything in slow-motion, such is there desire to express everything in a continuous haze. They assert their vision as if in memories, as if the smoke exiting an inconsequential pair of lips on a dance floor somewhere suddenly casts out from it a drag on time itself and the beat collapses from the regimental 4/4 and all you’ve got is this great cloud hanging in the air; a blurred projection of image and sound.
In memories time is a frozen snippet, adjusted by our mind’s own digital editing software as we view the events, but as we reconstruct these events other events obscure and obfuscate giving a diaphanous quality to our past. In SALEM’s own world they appear to create as if trying to remember a painting they once saw, but as time has past the memories have become opaque, the colours have blended together, the frame has become rotten.
On their new record, King Night, SALEM effect a rapid relocation of sound, straddling the Great Lakes to look down upon North America’s continental plains and pricking back their ears to listen out for any great innovation in sound. Drawing from Chicago Juke, to Seattle Grunge, to Crunk, to Detroit House, to San Fran Chill-wave to Chopped and Screwed to Southern Hip-Hop and more. It is a Dance record stolen of its pace, a Shoe-gaze record infiltrated with invention, a modern record fit to swallow the world.
Out now on I Am Sound Records.
Stephen Smith.
Futuresoundstemporary
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