“In the church of texture, the disintegration of signal is God.” Thus says Dana Wachs, and if the statement is true, then her recording project as Vorhees proves her to be a mystic of the highest order. Having honed her craft as an audio engineer for the likes of St. Vincent and Deerhunter—two acts who treat the texture of a recording as inseparable from the song itself—Wachs is preparing to release the Black Horse Pike EP on Styles Upon Styles next Friday.
Today, we’re premiering the record’s penultimate track, “Souvenir.” It’s a marvel of balance that finds Wachs braiding sustained lasers of guitar around an EKGing kick drum that seems to beat under its own power. While the rich tonal work seems at first to be a fine piece of ambience in keeping with much of the rest of Black Horse Pike, Wachs calmly molds it into a moody, genuinely affecting meditation on loss and regeneration. It’s an effortless-sounding expression of great existential weight, a felicity of sound if not substance.
Give “Souvenir” a listen below, and if you happen to be in New York, you can catch Black Horse Pike’s release show at Brooklyn’s Union Pool on February 25.
