Torn Hawk will release his Let’s Cry And Do Pushups At The Same Time LP on November 10th via Mexican Summer, and in preparation the artist has a brand new visual single for the track “Acceptance Speech“. The work of solo musician and video artist Luke Wyatt, Torn Hawk’s spiraling, lo-fi guitar instrumentals are built from cheap, thrift store drum machines, synthesizers, and Wyatt’s live guitar parts. Over the course of several LPs, as well as a handful of EPs and singles for labels like Not Not Fun, No Pain In Pop, and his own Valcrond Video label, Wyatt has honed this working method into his own singular style. “Acceptance Speech” casts an initially menacing glow thru it’s filtering, subterranean beats and frenetic clouds of arpeggiating, digital scree. Looped such that these elements seem to advance while continually returning to the same spot, the music has the quality of a tense news crawl narrating a Black Friday stock market crash. That is until Wyatt’s mirrored refractions of guitar delay knife through the cloudy proceedings like day-glo shards of warped sunshine, casting “Acceptance Speech” with an almost bitter-sweet after glow.
Luke Wyatt’s idiosyncratic visual style is also on display for this YouTube posting of the track. Much like in his music, Wyatt likes to leave the elements of his working method visible, such that that the piece itself seems to perform it’s own creation. Here, he pans in and out on static images of himself, animating hand scrawled Torn Hawk logo’s and multiple screen perspectives, while providing the viewer random peeks at his own personal desktop, complete with open Finder windows for a behind-the-scenes glimpse deeper into Torn Hawk’s digital soul.
