HTRK‘s outstanding new LP Psychic 9-5 Club is out this week on Ghostly International, and today we take a listen to Nigel Yang and Jonnine Standish‘s new work via the label’s Soundcloud page. Yang explains that the album was imagined as a music for a telepathic club space, “where everyone is hyper-aware whilst being also very calm,” to which Standish adds, “It’s a club that exists from the hours of 9 – 5, Monday to Friday. It’s like flipping the idea of an 80s nightclub…P9-5C promotes connections made through a higher sense of awareness and focus.”
Indeed, experimenting with “altered states through fasting and meditation” during the writing of the new album, the pair’s interest in attaining new levels of awareness can be seen as part of a continuing process in the healing of the wounds they suffered with the loss of their bandmate Sean Stewart in 2010, after his suicide.
Psychic 9-5 Club was recorded over the course of three summers in New York, Santa Fe, and the duo’s hometown, Sydney Australia, though the bulk of the work seems to have been done with Excepter’s Nathan Corbin at a desert studio in New Mexico. Yang says that Corbin, as producer, played a huge part in the shaping of the album, helping to give it a “sense of depth and spaciousness”; and, the result is that HTRK’s dubbed out, deep bass sonics and minimalist aesthetic are given plenty of room here to reverberate their chill(ed) and focused vibes.
Having made a conscious effort to get away from the “cold north,” and seeking warmer southern climates with an interest in just how that might influence their music, Standish explains: “We didn’t have to twist things too much with this album; we experimented with more open song structures and melodies and just went with the flow. We were curious to see where it would take us.”
“Blue Sunshine“, the album’s second track, is probably the best example of this more summery disposition, and though it contains “healthy doses of inner peace,” cooler existential realities still prevail as Standish sings with exaggerated drawl “I’m dying,” before finishing a long, expectant pause with “just to be here.” Repeating the second part of that phrase several times for reassurance, maybe, and emphasis, too, it’s the kind of irony that lies at the heart of HTRK’s core–a conscious awareness of death and loss and life’s deeper mysteries!
