Torn Hawk - Let's Cry and Do Pushups At The Same Time (Guitar Solos, VHS Video Mulching and Nostalgia without Irony)

We always get Com Truise and Torn Hawk mixed up in our mind.  They have absolutely nothing in common musically, Com makes godawful electronic music that sounds like one long Casio keyboard solo complete with drum beat.   Torn Hawk's music is much much more. The only thing they have in common is the pun of their names evoking the nostalgia present in their music:  Tom Cruise and Tony Hawk.

A handful of Electronic artists are making things harder not easier on themselves these days (Andy Stott could be included on that list for deciding to collect and learn how to make music with analogue rather than digital equipment).   Hawk for his part plays guitar on most of Let's Cry and Do Pushups At The Same Time.  In fact the finer points on the album are guitar driven like the opener I'm Flexible, Afterprom and Because of M.A.S.K. (which sounds like it could be a Torn Hawk remix off of Pink Floyd's Endless River).   In an eery way Torn Hawk's newest album (though electronic) is tilling over similar nostalgiac ground, while reinventing it, not unlike The War On Drugs did with this years phenomenal Lost In The Dream.  The Showpiece on Pushups is Acceptance Speech which carries itself with the sort of exultant feeling that might accompany an acceptance speech (or not your acceptance speech, but one you saw in a movie once and longed for that recognition ever since).

This is Torn Hawk's second LP this year following Through Force Of Will and a slew of varied releases put out on L.I.E.S., Not Not Fun, Rush Hour's 'No Label', 1080p, as well as several other labels including his own Valcrond Video imprint.   Hawk, born Luke Wyatt, grew up in Charlottesburg, Virginia where his "stepmom owned an independent movie theater, for many years... (which cultivated) the atmosphere of film literacy".  Wyatt has developed a parallel practice to his music production which he calls Video Mulching.

In addition to working with VHS to come up with his visual productions the process has informed his musical process as well: 

"Besides aesthetics, I began to work with tape for my music because I was tired of so many choices in editing music on a computer. When I bounced a mix to tape, those decisions became locked in. When working with video, I like sending images I have honed in Photoshop, for example, to VHS, because it provides a sort of anti-sheen and flatness that smears your decisions. The key word is "inevitable"—beyond individual images, cultivating inevitability is about creating a sense around the edits and the sequence that there was no other way to assemble things. That this was something preordained that had always existed."