Here, he stands swallowed by the sky
Life, so small – dust in nature’s eye
He seeds the ground, fallow by death’s hand
Our hidden past, the fiction of all man
L’Avenir has ushered in their latest album, Secrets, with the video for Animism, a coldwave séance of mineral calm and occult motion, where the air seems to have been left under overnight under a full moon, and returned with new intelligence. The Baltimore project, led by Jason Sloan, treats electronic music as architecture as much as emotion: a corridor of blue light, a stairwell descending beneath memory, a voice arriving from somewhere just beyond the visible wall. On this first single from the project’s eighth album, Sloan works with a familiar vocabulary: patient drum-machine pressure, icy synthesizers, distant singing – but the result feels newly charged, as if each element has been placed glowing under glass.
Animism takes its title with admirable seriousness. The song imagines a world in which matter has memory and the inanimate keeps counsel. The earth, the tree, the old room, the object handled too often by human longing: all seem to possess a private pulse. Sloan’s voice sits inside the track rather than above it, less a guide than a presence caught in the same current as the listener. The effect is intimate and estranged, the sound of someone speaking from within a thought that has become physical.
The track brings to mind the elegant austerity of Eleven Pond, the dusky romanticism of Clan of Xymox, the severe European mechanics of Parade Ground, and the cerebral chill of Trisomie 21. These references move through the song like figures glimpsed in frosted glass, recognizable but never allowed to dominate the room. The arrangement advances with a measured hand, giving each synth line and percussive motion enough space to breathe before the next cold gleam arrives.
The accompanying video, directed by Soleil Noir Studios, deepens the spell. Shot by Jason Sloan, with Sloan also handling video synthesizer programming and both analogue and digital hardware, the clip turns the forests of the mind into a prismatic terrain. Bright colours bloom against mirrored images; faces and forms double, dissolve, and reassemble in a kind of psychic woodland. The imagery suggests a psychedelic passage through inner nature, where branches become nerves, light becomes thought, and perception starts to behave like a living organism.
Animism presents L’Avenir as a project still devoted to solitude, mystery, and nocturnal design, but newly attentive to the strange life hidden inside surfaces. Sloan makes darkwave feel porous here, open to trees, stones, ghosts, and the quiet intelligence of everything we mistakenly believe is still.
Watch the video for “Animism” below:
Secrets is out now via EINS:ZWEI:ACHT on vinyl, CD, digital, and streaming formats. Listen to Animism below and order Secrets here.
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The post “Dust in Nature’s Eye” — Baltimore Coldwave Project L’Avenir Summons the Spirit World in Video for “Animism” appeared first on Post-Punk.com.
