We wrote about Derek Janzen’s self-titled début under the Island Eyes moniker last year, enjoying it so much that a track made it onto Our Favourite Songs of 2015 list this January. The album was strange and pretty and laced with sadness, a digital-age quest where you are never quite sure if the narrator has moved anywhere at all. “However,” we wrote in May:
the odyssey is not a Hollywood movie with heroic deeds and happy endings. Instead it’s littered with confusion and menace, ominous imagery invoking random violence of nature and other forces, clear narrative replaced by the intuitive jumble of a dream.
Janzen has recently released a video for the song ‘October Mirage’. Filmed and directed by himself, it consists of home-movie style VHS footage which cycles through scenes of varying ordinariness. There are pumpkin carvers, band members and light shows, smiles and frowns and empty rooms. The shots sometimes blur or distort or rewind, making it clear you are watching a recording and wrapping the whole thing in a distant anguish, like looking back at places from which you are now locked out, times to which you can never return.
You can buy the album now from Legwarmer Records, on cassette via the Island Eyes Bandcamp page.
