Caruso

Originally a 2011 digital release, Pnk Cloud is the first of two LP reissues on the General Manager label from Durham, North Carolina’s Caruso, aka Matt DeBellis. Here, his love for the abstract edge of the shoegaze spectrum (noise, loops, washes of sound) culminates.

DeBellis’ music is known for its genre fluidity. Regarding his second single, “You Heard Me,” Maarten Schiethart of Pennyblackmusic described him as “a chameleon...one moment he pleases the electronic Mille Plateaux community and then swiftly pursues in a fashion that will make Twisted Nerve fans' "ears drip with indie ooze.”

Heavily inspired by Jefre Cantu-Ledesma’s 2010 ambient drone masterpiece, Love is a Stream, DeBellis‘ album mixes sonic textures with a wide array of found sounds and melancholic piano melodies. On “Side 1,” Bending guitar loops weave through (actual) call-and-response phone recordings from DeBellis’ stint at an American Airlines call center: ”I’m in Satan’s kingdom right now / And how can I help you get back up from there, sir?” Eventually, the guitar loops devolve into drones and morph slowly into a white-noise-enveloped vocal cacophony. Departing from these varied sound collages, “Side 2” is a long, engaging and hypnotic piece that incorporates layered guitar drones with unedited street noise and voices of passersby during the 2010 “Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear” in Washington, D.C. Pnk Cloud was mastered for vinyl by Warren Defever, whose own music and production mirrors this recording’s sonically playful editorial approach.