Homeshake, the project of Montreal-based Peter Sagar, announces his new album, Helium, to be released 15 February 2019. A budding interest in ambient and experimental music pushed him to tinker with the micro-sounds that surround the songs here. Today we hear first single, ‘Like Mariah’. Listen below!
Sagar began writing Helium shortly after completing 2017’s Fresh Air, and in the middle of what he calls a “binge” reading of Haruki Murakami. It’s not hard to picture the narrator of these songs as a distinctly Murakamian character: He moves through time by himself, bemused by and insulated from a world he doesn’t quite seem to have been made for.
The record is stitched together by a series of instrumental interludes, synthesiser explorations whose haziness adds to the suspicion that this is all an uncanny dream. Which isn’t to say that Sagar is unmoored in his own world. In fact, much of Helium is the result of what he calls “a much clearer mental state” than the one he’d experienced shortly following Fresh Air’s completion.
Where his previous three records were recorded directly to one-inch tape in a local studio, Helium was recorded and mixed by Sagar alone in his apartment in Montreal’s Little Italy neighborhood between April and June of this year. Freed of the rigid editing process he’d endured before, he was able to lose himself in pursuit of tone and texture.
Helium is a record made by someone who doesn’t feel beholden to any particular set of sounds, textures, or instruments to get his point across. In that sense, it feels closer to the bone, at once assured of its vision and remarkably vulnerable. It’s perhaps our purest view yet of Homeshake’s home country.
Listen / purchase ‘Like Mariah’: https://homeshake.lnk.to/like-mariah
