Album: north of fifty-four.
Artist: sirch.
(Bandcamp)
Four stars (out of five)
Imagine taking snippets of your past — home videos, Vine clips, text messages — and setting them to music. Sounds like the basis of some futuristic corporation in a sci-fi film, but several Edmonton artists are already mining their childhood memories, including popster Doug Hoyer and sound designer Chris Szott, also known as sirch. His debut, north of fifty-four., weaves sounds from his childhood, National Film Board clips, and mining/tourist board videos to produce an eerie, electro-ambient retrospective of his life to date, both bittersweet and reaffirming. The nine-song album starts off with the drip-drop of icy synths and a transmitter-radio voice telling us about The Sunless City, a novel about a prospector who builds a submarine to explore a Manitoba lake. Pierce The Sky takes pulsing throbs, undulating synths, a recitation of mining history and turns them into the score of a David Lynch-ian film about Flin Flon, where Szott spent much of his childhood. Beach Babies mixes crashing waves, hypnotic guitar riffs and blinking beats with audio from a family vacation. “Wave to mommy!” says a female voice, backed by a whoosh of water. Charming and seductive — you’ll want one of your own memory soundtracks after listening to north of fifty-four.
