Asheville’s Colin Miller established himself in the music community as a recording engineer and producer, working on some fantastic records such as I Love My Mom by Indigo De Souza and Wednesday’s I Was Trying to Describe You to Someone on Orindal Records. However, the past year has seen him step to the front of the process, working on his own music at his home studio.
The resulting EP, My Love in the Winter, finds an artist both technically adept and emotionally resonant, showing a real sense of vision in the manner he works to combine genres to expand and subvert conventions. Crafted with acoustic guitars, “cheap” synthesizers and a 4-track cassette recorder, Colin Miller works with the main principles of classic bedroom pop yet stretches the possibility of the sound, pushing into out into ambient territory.
The melancholic sprawl of opener ‘Vice’ introduces the vivid textures of Colin Miller’s work, the track playing with the tunnelled awareness that arrives in the aftermath of great upheaval, while ‘Anna’ presents a warmer sound with almost LVL UP-esque vocals. ‘I Will Always Make A Place (For You)’ hovers somewhere between defiant and devotional before ‘Help Me Remember’ pushes decisively into the ambient end of the spectrum, and erasure poem ‘Spare’ shows its own experimental edge with peals of distortion.
Centred around a home fire, ‘Prodigy’ is a track of creeping intensity, sparking into life with a volatile air and never letting up. Sometimes it slows to a flicker, at others swirls with an off-kilter grace, possessing something of the paradoxical nature of burning building, where opposite forces collide. A meeting of silence and sound. The past and the present. Durable history and the decaying moment. “The flames have jumped the firewall,” Miller sings, “and found the old man’s oxygen / and taken both apartment complexes / that I grew up in.” There’s a carelessness to the the fire, a lack of regard that borders on mocking, and a cruel completeness too. “The flames sing ‘la la la’ / Family pictures curl in the heat,” goes the second verse. “The flames sing ‘la la la’ / Put the kids in the car and start it.”
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My Love in the Winter is out via Sub-Fi Records and available from the Colin Miller Bandcamp page. Miller also contributed to some fantastic compilations recently, so check out Days Go By (curated by Tenci) and the smallest snowstorm on record (curated by Wednesday).
