Back in July, the Philly no-wave revivalists Eraser released Operator!, their latest for hometown underground fixture Siltbreeze Records. The album came to my attention via recent Album Of The Week recipient Winston Hightower, who toured with Eraser this year, continuing a longstanding connection between Siltbreeze and the Columbus lo-fi community. Operator! is full of noisy, fidgety art-punk songs topped off by Sonam Parikh's piercing microphone presence.
If you played the album for me without context and told me it was recorded concurrently with the new TELLUS reissue in early '80s downtown NYC, you could maybe convince me. But no, this is the sound of artful agitation in the present, taking cues from the outré classics but fueled by current annoyance and outrage. Soul Glo's Pierce Jordan wrote their band bio, which tells us the album's songs are about "grief and death, analog mechanisms in the face of modernity, immigrant child shit, the recognition that nothing is inherently good or bad, self-dignity, self-efficacy, autonomy, having choices, searching for more." Eraser have a new video out today for album highlight "DVD," which offers a good excuse to point you in their direction.
Bassist Kat Bean directed the clip, and the band has this to say about it: Eraser presents the music video for “DVD” from their sophomore album Operator!, in which the band runs amok in an aging record store after dark, toying with the physical media formats name-checked in the song. The lyrics lament decaying forms of technology and communication styles that were clunkier but clearer, with each verse punctuated by paratactical declarations of defunct media formats. We have adapted to learn new social dialects in the same way that we have learned digital communication, though both systems are fraught with obfuscations, tempestuous variables, and inevitable obsolescence.
This song is an attempt to stay grounded while untangling the labyrinths of social acceptance that prevail in our strange modern world where sincerity itself is a dying language. Shot on various digital cameras from the early aughts and directed by bassist Kat Bean, the video addresses the virtual debris before us through retro futurist visions of 90s tech. Impetuously, it asks, "I see you!
You see me?" Watch below, and stick around for the whole album if you please. Operator! is out now on Siltbreeze.
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