In the previous month, Eraser, a Philadelphia-based outfit known for their revivalist no-wave posture, issued Operator!, their latest release for the local underground staple Siltbreeze Records. The record came onto my radar thanks to Winston Hightower, who toured with the band this year, underscoring a long-standing link between Siltbreeze and Columbus’s DIY lo-fi circle.
Operator! brims with jagged, nervous art-punk numbers anchored by Sonam Parikh’s piercing vocal presence. If you handed me the album without any context and suggested it was cut alongside the new TELLUS reissue from downtown early-’80s NYC, you might almost convince me. Yet this is very much contemporary art-punk noise—an agitation that follows the avant-garde trailblazers while being fueled by present-day irritations and outrage. Soul Glo’s Pierce Jordan authored their band bio, describing the songs as concerned with “grief and death, analog systems confronting modernity, immigrant childhood burdens, recognizing that nothing is inherently good or bad, dignity, self-efficacy, autonomy, having choices, and a quest for more.”
Eraser released a new video today for the album’s centerpiece track “DVD,” which serves as a convenient entry point into their world. Bassist Kat Bean directed the clip, and the band offers the following comment:
Eraser presents the music video for “DVD” from their sophomore album Operator!, in which the band runs amok in an aging record store after dark, toying with the physical media formats name-checked in the song.
“DVD” explores themes of social perception, surveillance and judgement. The lyrics lament decaying forms of technology and communication styles that were clunkier but clearer, with each verse punctuated by paratactical declarations of defunct media formats. We have adapted to learn new social dialects in the same way that we have learned digital communication, though both systems are fraught with obfuscations, tempestuous variables, and inevitable obsolescence. This song is an attempt to stay grounded while untangling the labyrinths of social acceptance that prevail in our strange modern world where sincerity itself is a dying language.”
Shot on various digital cameras from the early aughts and directed by bassist Kat Bean, the video addresses the virtual debris before us through retro futurist visions of 90s tech. Impetuously, it asks, “I see you! You see me?”
Watch below, and if you’re so inclined, stay for the full album.
Operator! is available now through Siltbreeze. Purchase it here.
