Shawn Magill and Joey Noga met by pure chance at a Cashmere Cat concert in Deep Ellum, Dallas, Texas. The pair immediately bonded over a shared love of synth music and Secrecies was born, a duo that looks to build upon the the genre by cherry picking elements from what has gone before. With the ethereal atmosphere of Beach House, the dark tones of Purity Ring, the vocal harmonies of Houses and the sultry disco cool of Blondie, Secrecies embraces the soul behind the electronic, breathing organic life into their layered sound and seeking to reconnect the with a human warmth within a digital soundscape.
“We’re very aware of the stigmas around borrowing too much from the past,” Noga explains of the Secrecies sound. “We wanted to use drum machines but didn’t want to use sounds anyone had used before. So we found our own instrumentation to honor our inspirations from the past and simplistic electronic sensibilities, but in our own voice.” The result is something that honours the past without dwelling on it, refuting the claim that trends need be purely mimetic by forging a new direction for the familiar sound.
However, not content with a traditional album, the band have developed a series of visual accompaniments, videos devised from old film reel clips stitched into striking footage, bringing to mind the documentaries of Adam Curtis. The effect is an added dimension and weight, the already atmospheric tracks rendered mysterious and deep with the assembled images. Be it the bug life of ‘So Quickly’, the celestial bodies of the icy ‘Far Away So Close’ or the strangely menacing medieval pantomime of closer ‘When We Speak’, each track is marked by a succinct film both abstract and intuitive, lending the band’s name a new significance as the dream logic of image and sound unfolds, meaning leaking from between the frames.
“As a lover of history, I’ve been working with vintage images as part of my artistic collage work for years,” Magill explains, “constantly scanning public domain archives for historical images to mix up with modern photos as part of fashion look-book remixes and other projects.” And, perhaps unsurprisingly, the style fits in with the Secrecies style too. “Themes of my artwork have always been around finding the untold stories and bringing them to light, usually involving women since those are many of the stories that haven’t been told. I’m a firm believer that history repeats itself and I love uncovering these new things maybe we don’t have to repeat the same old story.”
We’re lucky enough to be sharing the entire video collection, so find a pair of headphones and a darkened room and allow yourself to be immersed in the Secrecies world.
Secrecies is out now via Idol Records and you can listen on Soundcloud, Spotify, and Apple Music.