Hyperdawn's Ghostly Salford Transmissions
HYPERDAWN
‘Steady’
New album released 13th October 2023 on Them There Records
Check out the video for Maybe directed by Sophie Barrott
https://youtu.be/N6c992SMunM?si=sDPpRbhGf1r2EhNo
3rd November - Album launch @ The White Hotel, Salford
As with walking through a restless city - when music from your headphones coalesces with nearby car radios, the white noise of the streets, the littered growls from labored engines, and fragmented conversations of passers-by - Hyperdawn’s new album Steady finds life in the entangled fragments of machinery, nature, and strangers’ lives that drift in and out of awareness. The group - formed of Michael Cutting and Vitalija Glovackyte - spent a lengthy three years living with Steady, a period of meticulous sketching, refining and distorting that’s evident in the expansive detail of the music. Just as a city can seem at once dense and unending, Steady rewards repeat explorations, with each listen revealing hidden pathways, lanes, ginnels and backstreets.
First track from the record is accompanied by a video by director Sophie Barrott that’s part waiting area, part internal psyche - a twisted blend of space and headspace, that aims a spotlight on the discourse surrounding men's mental health, a subject recently spotlighted yet persistently overlooked.
At the video's core lies a lone figure ensnared within the clutches of his own psyche, a prisoner of his thoughts, incapable of forging ahead or fleeing the confines of his state of mind. Cal McVann, a figure both elusive and magnetic, breathes existence into our protagonist, channeling a performance referenced to be stoic and unmoving, with a light twist of Charlie Kaufman's idiosyncrasy. His movements drag, as if an extra gravitational pull pins him to the floor, as increasingly bizarre moments of rebellion to the role increase in intensity.
On the rest of the album, the duo cite fleeting encounters as the stimulus behind each of the tracks, interactions with “people navigating their own hardships, almost giving up but always struggling through”. For instance, Vitalija recalls a heartfelt conversation after a night shift with an old man she met at a bus stop who had, as slowly became apparent, escaped his care home in a bout of dementia. This inspired the song ‘a couple of strangers’, a track of scattered percussion stabs and janky piano that seem to lie in parts around the disembodied vocals. Similarly, the lilting pitch-shifted voices that rise and fall in and out of the murk in tracks like ‘maybe’ and ‘steady’ reference intimate late night conversations with friends dealing with loss and grief. Or ‘basic’ bearing witness to in-work harassment and exploitation, zero-hours workers persevering through gritted teeth. Hyperdawn used these real-world vignettes as a kind of musical road map. Note also the beautiful underwater choir effect in the title track, or the guttural groans in ‘say it so’ that counterpoint the stacked harmonies. This all suggests a multiplicity of voices, of narratives, in a wide variety of contexts that’s entirely in keeping with the album’s overall feel. At times, Steady can feel like a series of ghostly broadcasts from the end of the universe.
