Nightlands :: Suzerain

From our friends at Secretly Canadian:

As Nightlands, Philadelphia multi-instrumentalist David Hartley makes enormous music, warm and thunderous music. However, in this largeness, there is lost not one iota of the personal, the subtle, the cerebral. These psych-pop hymns and melodic collages hoisted us right up onto their astral plane from the very first listen. We are elated to say that Nightlands will be releasing its debut album Forget the Mantra on Secretly Canadian November 9 in the U.S. (November 8 in the U.K), in LP and digital formats.

Hartley has been a prolific sideman in many Philadelphia ensembles most notably, The War On Drugs. The music he creates in his bedroom is itself a bed of delicate, chiming strings and bubbling synths beneath a blanket of choral arrangements. It’s dreamy in the literal sense– the seeds for the album were sown when Hartley began archiving musical ideas that occurred in his sleep with a simple bedside tape recorder. As a result Forget the Mantra is, in essence, a field recording of Hartley’s dreams.

The album deals with themes of anxiety, fear and limits of concentration. Therein it mines Hartley’s own history splicing in fragments of found recordings from Hartley’s past, that add both an experimental element to the album as well an almost ghostly feel and a deeply personal resonance.

You can check out two tracks below, “300 Clouds” and “Suzerain (A Letter to the Judge).” Pitchfork found Nightlands a while back and had this to say about “300 Clouds”: “There are degrees of warmth…and Philadelphia musician Dave Hartley’s Nightlands project sounds like it was recorded in a hearth…Hartley’s music seeps out and fills spaces, combining the kind of expansive resonance found in Mercury Rev’s Deserter’s Songs with Beach Boys-like vocal arrangements.” “Suzerain (A Letter to the Judge)” is offered here for the first time.