Avalon city retreat series#

An album about memory is also an album about forgetting, about past futures forever unexplored. Within the bittersweet isolation chamber of “Entombed in Ice” or the idyllic memory of air travel on “Dreamliner,” you might perceive something of the pandemic mood, a wistful spiritual fatigue combined with the faint glimmer of unrealized possibility. The music feels a little intentionally maladjusted, a little out of step, because instead of bending tempos or pitch in a DJ mix, Emerson is playing with the emotional timing mechanisms of nostalgia. The lyrics to “Sandrail Silhouette” or “Hot Evening” play out like someone reminiscing in the incandescent glow of vintage photographic slides, hinting at details just outside the frame. If Avalon Emerson seems like she knows everything, & the Charm wishes it could know less. Occasionally an image from the new album appears to evoke the scene through their windshield, or maybe a rear-view glance to Emerson’s childhood in Arizona: “Hot dunes, an oasis” “This desert isn’t your friend.” Its video features road trip footage Emerson and Lombard shot while driving from California to New York in summer 2020, as the pandemic settled in. Emerson recorded a kind of shadow entry in this catalog, the cover of the Magnetic Fields’ “Long Forgotten Fairytale” that opens her 2020 DJ-Kicks mix.

Avalon city retreat series#

In another sense, the idea for & the Charm came from a series of covers compilations that London songwriter and album executive producer Bullion produced for his Deek label, featuring stylized reconsiderations of pop and alternative classics: silver-voiced balladeer Westerman singing Simon & Garfunkel, a chanson version of Joe Jackson’s “Stepping Out,” that sort of thing. Emerson aims directly at the idea of imitative music with “Karaoke Song,” actually a song about karaoke songs, co-produced with Nick Sylvester.

So this is music that sounds familiar by design, songs that want you to feel like you’ve heard them before. Why Techno Rule-Breaker Avalon Emerson Traded Club Bangers for Featherlight Dream-Pop Daytime Avalon: Lightness for the summer, for a world that spent a year or two away from the club, for sunrise first thing in the morning instead of last thing at the end of the night. “My idea of a perfect record is a Cocteau Twins record, things that are soft and beautiful,” she told Pitchfork. In Emerson’s case, pandemic restrictions enforced a pre-planned break from touring and, perhaps, opened more time for home listening. It’s just my job to notice this stuff, but Emerson’s project shares a remarkably similar origin: An internationally successful DJ and producer, pummeled by jet lag and burnout, eventually takes refuge in a few close confidants and a new creative avenue that’s simultaneously more “pop” and more niche. The other members of the Charm include wife Hunter Lombard and friend Keivon Hobeheidar, a lineup that recalls Marie Davidson’s partner-and-friend pop trio Marie Davidson & L’Œil Nu. The lucid dream-pop ditties of & the Charm take in the misty-eyed gaze of Japanese city pop, the slow-mo fireworks of shoegaze, the gentle sea spray of Balearic house, the jangly collage aesthetic of Saint Etienne.