From Memory by Clothing

“It’s just another day in my kingdom of fun” are the first words you’ll hear on Clothing’s debut album From Memory. "The gods are watching, they're setting the sun on fire." As dawn breaks, the listener drops into a restless landscape of angular synthesizers and lush melody, provocative rhythms bracketed by sudden silences. This is a particularly distinctive form of a pop song, both surprising and distantly familiar, a no-frills sonic psychedelia where the beat is wherever you think it is.

Clothing is the result of the long-gestating friendship and musical collaboration between Aakaash Israni (Dawn of Midi) and Ben Sterling (Mobius Band, Cookies). They met over a decade ago on the stoop of a Crown Heights house party and became close friends. Sterling took Israni to Madison Square Garden to see his beloved Knicks, and Israni returned the favor by smuggling Sterling onto the stage as his ”bass tech” when Dawn of Midi opened for Radiohead at the same venue. Soon Israni was playing bass in Sterling's band Cookies, which was also his first time playing an electric bass after a lifetime on upright. “You’d think that it would be easy, but I could barely tell where the notes were,” says Israni.

Sterling is a born and bred New Yorker who came of age marinating in pop music, while Israni is an Indian-born, SoCal surfer who studied classical composition in France and free improvisation at CalArts. These different backgrounds and interests created a productive and surprising friction: when the two began sharing musical ideas, it turned out that Israni didn't know what a chorus was in popular music. "I had never even considered how a pop song was constructed," says Israni. Sterling had much to learn from Israni, too—especially about the intricate Ghanaian music that inspired Dawn of Midi’s Dysnomia and that soon came to underpin the unexpected rhythms of From Memory.

But this was circa 2014. How exactly does a band take 10 years to make a record? And one that (blissfully) doesn't even break 30 minutes in length? Sterling: “The short answer is that we work very slowly.” The longer answer invokes life’s mundane details – children, cross country moves – as well as the duo’s painstaking search for vocal collaborators. "We learned that it's incredibly hard to imagine a voice singing a song that it hasn’t sung yet," says Sterling. It was like casting a dream. And though the process stretched over years, it’s hard to argue with the results from Amber Coffman's powerful delivery, L'Rain's hypnotic timbre, Anna Wise's earthy expressivity and Elliott Skinner's elastic tenor.

The collaborations were fruitful on both sides. L’Rain: “Sometimes singing can feel overwhelming or scary, but not this time: it felt really liberating to record this music and to have Ben and Aakaash trust me to put a little bit of myself into it. I'm so grateful!" Amber Coffman: "It was really cathartic singing it. I love a good puzzle and a song that makes my musical brain work a little harder. It was a gratifying challenge- really enjoyed working with Aakaash and Ben.”

From Memory’s lyrics capture our bizarre modernity, zeroing in on the small victories and surreal indignities of a tech-obsessed era that diminishes humanity. Greed, longing, war and transcendence swell up and disappear, and unnamed gods appear with trickster-like intentions. An undercurrent of humor permeates the acid observations. “Embracing absurdity is the only way either of us survive in this world,” says Sterling. “I’m sure that it informs everything we do.”

Taken together, From Memory’s eight songs use the duo’s disparate musical histories to forge a new rhythmic reality. The album begins at the dawn of a strange new day in “Kingdom” and closes with “Sunset?”, a swirling, apocalyptic daydream. Here we find L’Rain crooning “here comes oblivion” on repeat while an enigmatic tangle of rhythm and fuzz builds layer upon layer beneath her. Finally Skinner’s voice joins in, sounding far more worked up over this whole oblivion thing, and “Sunset?” crests its particular, hypnotic wave. The song fades out very slowly – but into what exactly? The apocalypse? A new beginning? Or “just another day,” just another sunset? Clothing doesn’t have the answers, but they’re asking the questions.


Bio essay by Emma Cline

Clothing is Aakaash Israni (Dawn of Midi) and Ben Sterling (Mobius Band, Cookies).

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