Shoegaze-inflected lo-fi ambient grouping Chainlacing‘s debut album, Messuage, is out now via specialist dark music label These Hands Melt, as is a video for the single ‘Simulacra’.
Messuage was composed and performed by founding members Lauren Crosser and Rick Martel. Chainlacing was started in New Hampshire, where Crosser would travel from Boston to record guitar ideas in Martel’s home studio. They gravitate toward lo-fi ambient guitar and synthesisers, melodic drones, reverb, and gloom-like shoegaze, goth, or industrial recorded on 4-tracks.
The duo were recently joined by Joe Streeter of Have A Nice Life, Nick Watter of Slow Quit and Dan Hartel of Still Life Sounds. As Chainlacing, they have developed an immersive live sound that’s said to have the heaviness of funereal doom, the sonic atmosphere of shoegaze, and the vulnerability of dream pop and folk.
Messuage features the tracks: ‘Petty Pleas’, ‘Overdetermined’, ‘Preacher’, ‘Fragile’, ‘Sublimate’, ‘Stay’, ‘Simulacra’, ‘Compulsion’ and ‘Empty Cages’. It is available digitally, on CD with a 3-panel panoramic digisleeve limited to 200 copies, and an LP on trans-glass vinyl limited to 150 copies.
The band said of ‘Simulacra’ that it is: “Inspired by the lush rural landscapes of northern New England. A lyrical and textural examination of the fabric of memory and our innate need to have a meaningful connection to our collective past.”
Available on all streaming services, it follows the previously released ‘Overdetermined’, among other singles and an EP, plus collaborations.
Original duo Crosser and Martel also participate in other Massachusetts-area bands. Crosser drums in heavy shoegaze band Slow Quit, based in Boston, and Martel plays guitar in Lowell grunge band Tysk Tysk Task.
