Musical mad scientist Gabriel Walsh is back with "Cicatrise Dud," the latest offering from his ever-shapeshifting project The Earthly Frames and the first single from the new full-length Infranyms, out June 3rd.
With "Cicatrise Dud," Walsh delves into robotics and the human-technology interface while giving us a taste of his new direction: a retro-futuristic barrage of rock and pop, Infranyms sees Walsh finding the ecstatic sweet spot between new wave and no wave while balancing synthetic sounds with careful, introspective songwriting.
One of most captivating experimentalists on the contemporary indie landscape, Walsh has switched genres over the course of the last six Earthly Frames albums, from electronic to classical to what Walsh himself describes as "deeply weird rock." And, as his body of work expands, Walsh increasingly resembles a kind of missing link between classic American eccentrics like R. Stevie Moore and modern YouTube outsider artists like Louis Cole.
Infranyms is the seventh album in Walsh's series The Rainbow Table — a decade-plus endeavor to create an LP for each color of the classic ROYGBIV mnemonic. Infranyms occupies the much-debated indigo spectrum of The Rainbow Table. Many speculate Sir Isaac Newton only added this half-way color to align with a grander pattern he saw in observation and the occult. Infranyms celebrates this gloriously unverifiable assertion in measure and mystery.
The Earthly Frames is the current musical incarnation of Gabriel Walsh. (Walsh derived the name from the almost-disturbingly trippy children's puppet program Magic Star Traveler.) For twenty-five years Walsh has been producing experimental pop recordings. He’s played in bands such as sad-songers Timesbold, freaky-improvers Wooden Wand & the Vanishing Voice, and Hebrew space-rockers The Solillians.
With The Earthly Frames, we can hear the through-line of layered, warped sounds that Walsh has been honing for a quarter century join up with a fixation on disjointed, fictional worlds. For example, the first Earthly Frames release was a USB drive with a one-of-a-kind narrative fragment. Owners of the devices had to choose whether or not to share their particular artifact with the others to complete the story or keep it to themselves - flipping the notion of music file sharing on its head. The following release came with a card game and short film all set in the world of a billboard salesman who’s having a nervous breakdown.
"...the perfect combination of sophisticated lyrics and ragged, heartfelt vocals — which are both entirely unique in the current music climate." — Big Takeover
"Heady science-fiction metaphysics mix with earthy Americana... [the] untethered embrace of bold sounds and themes sets the project apart from artists who simply forge a signature and tinker with it. Walsh’s work relishes in the profound and the challenging." — Tinnitist
"...melancholy but neon. Cuddly bitterness and sublime despair." — NoHo Arts District
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