The ever prolific Sam Ray has gotten around to doing what he had promised to do many years ago. Finally, his ambiguous, genre-less outfit, long identified with Teen Suicide, has been officially rebranded as American Pleasure Club.
The name has been used sporadically throughout the years, most recently on a series of songs posted on Tumblr over the last couple months. To celebrate the name change, the band has released a new mini-album called i blew on a dandelion and the whole world disappeared.
The release moves through seven beautiful, crackling, tape-recorded acoustic songs, each featuring only one instrument and Ray’s voice, before opening up into an all-consuming, nine-minute drone piece, in Ray’s typical esoteric style.
Read Sam Ray’s official statement to Noisey and listen to i blew on a dandelion and the whole world disappeared below.
This album, ‘Dandelion,’ has existed for a long time in the background of everything else we’e been working on. It started towards the end of 2015, when i would fall asleep almost every night listening to either Grouper’s Ruins” or the Townes Van Zandt record “Live at the Old Quarter”. Something that struck me about both – and Townes in particular – was how the songs worked so much better paired down to just his voice & guitar playing. Even songs that were already big hits in their original way, there was something both very comforting and very haunting about this stripped down take. It’s like a moment frozen in time, it’s completely unique. The same goes double for ‘Ruins,’ where each swell of rain behind her voice, or the sound of a “microwave beep” power outage cutting through her piano – these moments are perfect & it would be impossible to replicate them.
After listening to them so much, I started to want to write & record a record in the same style – where the atmosphere, the sound of each room, the time of day – every variable affected the song in a way that would be inimitable. In this way, the album existed & grew in the background of all of the proper projects we took on as a band, every so often a song written for something else would fail to materialize with a more proper arrangement & it would strike me suddenly that it was a perfect fit for this record, and then the record would grow by another song. It just made sense, somehow.
We have a new band name, finally—one we’ve been waiting to adopt since before our last record was released. We have a proper debut coming under that name, and i’m very excited about it and can’t wait for it’s release. That said, it felt right to re-introduce ourselves with something like this first, something very comforting but very haunting, textured & atmospheric, both of a piece perfectly with our past work but also new & completely inimitable.
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