Last year we wrote about Tan Cologne, a musical project formed when Lauren Green and Marissa Macias met in Taos, New Mexico that came to represent “both the creative journey of its creators and the landscape in which it took place.” Released via Labrador Records, their debut album Cave Vaults on the Moon in New Mexico was built around this idea, pushing beyond the surfaces to examine the spirit, or spirits, of place. The record “excavates the physical and metaphysical layers of the specific location,” we wrote in a preview, “digging through strata both natural and supernatural in attempt to represent New Mexico in all its strange, stark beauty.” A record of cults and visitation, of unexplained lights in the sky. Established in our world but leading into others. As we concluded:
Cave Vaults on the Moon in New Mexico is something of a gateway to a multidimensional version of the state—one where the organic and incorporeal exist side by side, and time is accordioned into a single present, eradicating the lines between past and future, earthly and extraterrestrial, science and divination.
Tan Cologne are back with a brand new single, ‘Heretic Porcelain’. Again released via Labrador, the song follows in the same vein as Cave Vaults, that paradoxical sense of being tied so closely to the land that it takes on an ethereal air. Made hazy by shifting dust and the horizon’s shimmer, the surrounding sense of space and weight of time.
But where the record often turned its attention skyward, the new single is very much rooted in the ground beneath our feet. “Circling through hypnotic reversals, ‘Heretic Porcelain’ sonically explores terrestrial responses to a tilted, worn, and skewed Earth,” the band explain. “Lyrically, the song centres on inevitable transformations, reactions, and animalistic behaviours.” Transcending the bodily mundane not through some alien rite or extraterrestrial technology but a reconnection to the ancient rhythms in the land and in ourselves.
These are the hypnotic reversals Tan Cologne reference. Innate patterns and cadences just outside of our understanding. Incantations capable of profound transformation. As though the key to reversing our distorted relationship with our home lies right there before us, hidden but all around. The words ‘heretic’ and ‘porcelain’ are paired, almost merged, and the refrain comes to represent the dualism at the heart of the track. Where the physical and spiritual blurs, the delicate and insolent too, the malleable and unyielding marbling into one.
The song comes complete with a video that further develops these themes. Described as “a set of rotating glimpses embodying momentum,” the video taps into the song’s dream-logic and helps precipitate its wisdom. Assembling “visions of desert high-winds, wild horses, a mother and daughter metal detecting, hot stones vaporizing water, and common depictions of elemental presence,” the band describe how the video works to “relay transformation in the directness that the action is the action itself.”
‘Heretic Porcelain’ is out now via Labrador Records and you can get it from the Tan Cologne Bandcamp page.