"He said 'I think it's time to move to Oregon'," Deepak Mantena wails, under a swarm of distortion, immediately summoning a different anthem to Northwest migration. If the dream of the '90s is alive in Portland, Mantena is livin' it; his producer-as-band project, Junk Culture, perform pop-cultural recycling on a library full of dusty samples.Following a pair of recent collaborations with Lower Dens leader Jana Hunter and Phantogram singer Sarah Barthel, Mantena polishes off his debut Junk Culture LP, Wild Quiet. The fact that it's out (July 31) on the non-clearing imprint Illegal Art —best known as the home of Girl Talk, but long an entity questioning notions of intellectual copyright, etc— shows that Mantena is still employing a host of samples.
But Wild Quiet features far more in the way of instruments; of traditional rock'n'roll construction. And so it goes with "Oregon," with its crunchy rock guitars and smashed drums and lack of cut-ups. The song turns out to be, once you peer beneath the fuzz and the synths, a tense dialogue in a relationship, where moving cities is either liberation or burden, depending on who you are. "I know I can't be free," Mantena sings, on close, and so the chapter does; freedom a vision that burns bright in the mind, but —even in a utopia like Portland— can easily be extinguished.
Junk Culture, "Oregon"
No comments:
Post a Comment