Nikolas Escudero is a Chilean writer, painter and musician based in California who this November put out his debut full-length, 100. Released through the good folks at Citrus City Records, the album consists of 12 tracks of lo-fi slacker pop, though the laid-back sound hides some rather lofty ambitions and intentions. So while the sound relies on uncomplicated arrangements, such simplicity is by design, supporting Escudero’s main intention and goal, that of creating “subjective narratives attempting to revisit a psychological space of naivety and simplicity.”
Book-ended by an abrasively noisy intro/outro that represents grasping for meaning “buried in indecipherability like a song behind radio static”, 100‘s lyrics are equally deliberate and ambitious. They fall (roughly) into two schools of thought. As described in the press release: “the songs stem from two fields; the first, infantile investigations of purpose that develop into involuted notions of objective truths…and the second consisting of reflections on interpersonal relationships.” This conceptual dichotomy is bridged in some of the tracks, uniting the piece as a cohesive investigation. Though, however technical or philosophical you want to get, the tracks are still lo-fi pop songs, the meaning unfolding intuitively, and boiling down to the instinctive and human need for recognition and connection:
“In totality, this album wishes to accomplish a subjective truth from a particular epoch of individual experience. It acts as a signifier for a singular narrative, with hope that others who are wading through similar existential discontent find solace for the duration the record”
We’re delighted to premiere the video for lead single ‘sand’, a track that’s lyrically minimal even for Escudero. Indeed, the three-and-a-half-minutes contain exactly twenty words, less if you exclude repetitions. But it somehow still plays more like an intimate conversation than stark poetry. The fluctuating instrumentation helps, swelling and receding at all the right moments, acting as a conductor for the lyrics and inferring a sense of significance that extends beyond immediate explanation.
The video is an abstract, hallucinatory experience, with a variety of computer generated shapes and structures rotating in blank space, playing like the video representations of sub-cellular structures, highly coloured proteins spinning through their esoteric purpose, much like the sparse and strange lyrics.
“the sand
my skin
one man
let inno more”
100 is out now and you can get it on cassette via Citrus City Records’ Bandcamp page, including a limited cream edition that includes ‘Universal Light’, a zine from Escudero himself.
