I will probably need more education to understand what NewVillager is about. The duo was performing at Make Music Pasadena, just before Best Coast, and they were quite hard to get at the first listening.
Accompanied by a drummer, Ben Bromley and Ross Simonini were playing synth and guitar and delivered these extra-long-hard-to-follow songs, which were wandering all over the place, with vocals ranging from high-pitched to really deep and low.
They were slowly stretching their tunes, with some moments of excitation from the guitar or the synth, but I could not really tell where they were going, with sometimes a part jamming for a few minutes, then suddenly a switch of direction with more excitement and a real urgency. They must have played only a very small number of their spacey disconcerting electro-pop songs, transforming them into something different at each moment of oddity.
They explained at the end of their set that they were building a mythology as they simultaneously make music, drawings, animations, performances, films, lectures, books and writings, using these different mediums to make the NewVillager mythology. They talked about the Human Resources Gallery in Chinatown where they have their installation called ‘Temporary Culture’.
According to intraffik.com, ‘they have built a village in the gallery where they’ll be working/living/sleeping each night as well as incorporating visual/musical performances from different artists throughout its duration’, (June 16th-21st).
If it seems a little weird, follow me; according to their website, they see their mythology as ‘a system of thinking, which is partially ‘found’ and partially created by the group and their collaborators’, as it is ‘not a story, but a lens to look at the world. It’s a ten-part framework of understanding the process of change. How does an object or a person or an idea go from one state to another state? It’s a question everybody asks any time anyone tries to create anything and the mythology is just our attempt at answering it’.
If you are still intrigued, their self-titled debut album will be out on August 16th on IAMSOUND Records.