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| Photo by: Shelby Fenlon |
Scott Hardware reveals his latest EP
Engel, via Telephone Explosion. He shares the new
video for “Millionaire” which follows Scott through a decades-long fixation on a very memorable one-night-stand.
We trail him through the years while ruminations of the encounter both bright and melancholic play in his memory on loop. Cyclical thoughts of power and pleasure aren’t the only things that repeat, however, and both Scott and his lover will eventually find their own way to relieve the encounter.
By Millionaire’s end we’re looking two ways: forward towards a potential (or parallel?) future, and behind us to a past this is rooted in something stronger than the passing of time - an archetype.
Engel marks the end of a three-year process of writing, recording and letting down his guard (for better or worse.) His last album,
Mutate, Repeat, Infinity, was the culmination of a years-long obsession with the HIV/AIDS crisis and how it was shaped by capitalism. Hardware’s early years after coming out were shaped by the courage of people close to him who were dealing with difficult diagnoses.
“Looking at these situations from a macro/societal lens must have been the only way I could process and share those years of my life and my loved ones’ lives with an audience” Hardware recalls. “From a writing and production standpoint, I was trying to re-imagine various eras of dance music and sound as urgent and vital as they would have in their heyday of the ‘80s and ‘90s.”
Within a year of moving back (to Toronto) from Berlin, Scott watched Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire and was immediately filled with its inherent curiosity. The film, in short, follows angels around pre-unification Berlin as they listen to the thoughts of the mortals they are surrounded by.
“
I sought with this album to capture the film’s velvety feeling – in turns funny, depressing, dark and mundane – in LP form” Hardware says. “
These songs imagine Wenders’ angels buzzing around my friends, my family and I. Writing from their point of view allowed me unfettered access to my own thoughts about them and myself.”
“Millionaire” swoops in on a courtship doomed from the beginning: “He’s a Millionaire, and what a Millionaire says goes”. A sense of inferiority follows the protagonist in his efforts date a richer man than himself – the romance being cut short because of the poorer man’s insecurities. He decides: better to be alone than to feel beneath.
“Millionaire” is the most delicate song on
Engel. Sullen guitars glide over a rolling plain of harps, drones and underwater motifs with Deidre Nox’s beautiful vocals bringing an almost camp level of melodrama to its crescendo as Hardware and Nox sing together: “
you can feel him like he’s always been there.”
The song ends on a sour note, in a swamp of drones and fallen electrical wire buzzes – and back where the protagonist began.
“Survivor’s Guilt” ties
Engel to Hardware’s previous work with its premeditation on illness and the grief left in its wake. A digitized voice reads a sister’s eulogy to her brother lost to suicide after years of losing his friends around him to “a disease.” The six-minute instrumental takes respective production cues from both Boyz II Men and vaporwave. A chopped voice asks sadly, ‘
How can I survive surviving?’ before Nox appears once again, singing the song (and album) to sleep.
Engel’s cover art is adorned by an image by artist Chris Curreri called the Insomniac. Curreri’s work winks and nods to queer sex, emotionality and darkness, and this piece is no different. This is work that reaches back to queer artists such as Francis Bacon and brings back with it a timeless everyday horror faced by queers: shame.
These are artists who visualize monsters and demons hiding in plain sight. Like singing to dead queer ancestors on Mutate, Repeat, Infinity, Hardware is trying to make sense of another queer cross-to-bear, this time coming from within. The image is gory and difficult, not unlike the process of digging shame from one’s spirit.
Engel, in its preoccupation with angels, the afterlife and private thoughts holds hands with the image.
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