The past 25 years has seen John Vanderslice evolve from an indie-folk songwriter into the sort of electronic musician who adopts a cheeky moniker like Google Earth to release a collection of songs called something cheeky like Mac OS X 10.11. The project with multi-instrumentalist James Riotto (with whom Vanderslice has been collaborating for over a decade) took shape last year with the release of the duo’s glitchy and lightly hypnagogic art-pop debut Street View, and continues later this month with their antiquated-operating-system-inspired LP dropping on August 29.
Ahead of that release date, the artists are sharing another new single called “Endless Corridor” which exemplifies their futuristic aesthetic and jammy structures, with the composition steadily and smoothly evolving over the course of four and a half minutes. "This is one of those songs that flows effortlessly, but took 100 hours to Tetris in,” Vanderslice explains. “It almost didn't make the record until Andrew Maguire added percussion and a blurring of the lines between drum machine and live room recording! Like all Google Earth songs, most of the song was recorded by Jamie and me in a two-hour improv session. We then built it out from there."
As for the song’s central idea, Riotto recalls a spark of inspiration from roughly around the time we were all using macOS 10.11: “Years ago I got stoned and went to see Interstellar in IMAX, and before the movie there was a sort of demonstration of the Dolby Sound system with lots of groovy, very hi-fi, but also quite silly, percussion music. I actually think John was with me, and we laughed so hard in the theater as it played. ‘Endless Corridor’ sort of reminds me of that music.”
Show off your own home theater system with the slightly more subtle track below.
