Cassette
In the summer of 2011, my partner and I were walking past a garage sale on her street. We saw this striking painting: a portrait of a man in a snow covered landscape. The houses look like the Swedish farmhouses I grew up seeing, flowers pinned to his coat, his head is shaped and wrinkled in layers like an onion. Simple lines, primary colors, and those glaring eyes.
The songs on Present Electric are scratchy, somewhat primitive, low fidelity recordings. They range from cassette 4-track recordings, voice memos, field recordings, and percussion-first songwriting. The “onion-head man” painting seems to pair well with the album. Both are naive in their own ways.
