Despite what Barbarian would have you believe, not all Airbnbs are evil. For Canadian art-pop experimenter Rich Aucoin, a recent stay at a rental unit led him to a Lowrey Genie organ with a built-in synthesizer, a particular bit of gear that he’d yet to feature on the recordings that will make up his quadruple album Synthetic, the first season of which was released last year. With 37 different synths featured on that first installment alone, his two latest singles continue this prolific quest to document a wide variety of electronic keys.
Following the release of “We’re in It Together,” “Pure” is a six-minute, fully instrumental track that feels less tied to the early-’10s synth-pop explosion and instead harkens a bit further back to Daft Punk and Justice—the latter artist providing a reference point bolstered by the organ’s sound. “I sat down and played it for a bit until I found this great bombast sound that reminded me of Justice’s brilliant Cross opener ‘Genesis,’” he shares. “So I recorded that along with its arpeggiator and that became the beginning of both this track as well as ‘We’re in It Together.’ The two tracks are quite different from one another, which is a nice recent reminder for me how every time someone sits down to make something, it can go a different direction even with the same initial starting points.”
Check out the new track below, and expect another volume of Synthetic in the not-too-distant future.
