Blue Dust Archive @ Retrobar 11/17/22

Brooklyn, NY based electronic artist Blue Dust Archive performs at Retrobar on 11/17/22

“Blue Lilies” now out on Burning Rose Records

“It’s hard, if not impossible, to make out the words; it sounds like they have been cut and pasted in a way that strips them of any actual signification, leaving only stray phonemes huddled together for warmth. But that ambiguity only makes the singer’s breathy tone all the more welcoming—like a beacon of light in an uncertain landscape.” – Pitchfork

At once expansive, exhaustive and emotionally algebraic, Blue Dust Archive’s Blue Lilies emerges as a sophisticatedly engineered soundboard, providing home to an exceedingly complex musical ecosystem. It’s one borne of an admiration of the “inscrutable and natural genius of life” that Blue Dust Archive, AKA Samuel Christopher, describes as a ‘’symphonic, art-pop epic with spiritual and mystical overtones”.

The New York City based Christopher says that with Blue Lilies, the core of its delivery hinged on the record’s sound design: its use of space, texture, and environmental interplay.

Christopher’s use of these elements is erudite. In ‘Blue Eternity’, mellifluous vocal sequences are plastered on top of a bell pattern that twists into an unconventional syncopation. The lyrics, however indiscernible, meet percussive samples snapping milliseconds in and out of step. Contorting and unfurling walls of gargantuan, romanesque sounding spaces come to develop new relationships with themselves throughout the record over and over again.

The record comes four years into Christopher’s career as Blue Dust Archive. What made these different from past efforts, he guesses, was a desire to assert himself and create work that would align with what he wryly describes as the most interesting contemporary push in music at the moment: “that of the sublime experimental pop auteur angel alien freak.”

“But maybe there’s a better way to put that?”