Back in September, we wrote about Regal Murk, the recording project of Brooklyn-based artist Zach Schwartz. Though ostensibly a bedroom pop record, Neat Defeat was a lesson in ambition and creativity, its twenty-seven songs “sprawl[ing] out between the poles of folk, indie rock and ambient styles.” The mood was equally far-reaching, capable of playful energy and offbeat charm but rooted in “pessimism and fury,” ultimately casting Schwartz as “a kind of self-aware, self-hating preacher at the end of the world.” A cynical dispatch from life in the twenty-first century trenches which nevertheless carried a small glint of optimism. A shred of hope implicit in the act of taping and sharing songs, no matter how gloomy those songs might be. As we continued:
Recorded as though destined for the void, just like everything else. But with its endless invention and wry rage, Neat Defeat is also a statement of opposition. A small rally against the encroaching doom. If or when someone hears it is almost besides the point. It’s there, it’s waiting. Why not lend a ear?
Regal Murk has taken on a big challenge in 2022. Each month will see the release of a brand new EP, a year-long project that will eventually culminate in a full-length album in 2023. “Generally speaking the project is made in defiance of death and as an attempt to not practice resignation,” Schwartz explains. A statement to be read in both its literal existential meaning and as a more general metaphor for what life asks of us in these times. A refusal surrender to a culture which encourages the deadening of creativity. As Schwartz continues:
It is fundamentally just an account, a record, or a journaling of sorts. A small logs of attempts, to keep honest and active. Some receipts I can refer to in order to prove I’m not exclusively a consumer. And to that end I continue entering an assortment of melodic phrases into a blank word document as though they are passwords that will unlock my life.
The tone is set from the first EP, Dead Dream Team which releases today via Bandcamp. Opener ‘if it ain’t the fire it’s the flood’ arrives with its stark tones, playing like a condemned man finding curious humour in his predicament.
if it ain’t the fire it’s the flood
two things that you can get enough ofif it ain’t defiled check again
but I have not been to heaven, maybe never, an prospectus
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‘Never Ask If…’ might be brighter but its rhythms hide a naked loneliness, its consuming preoccupation with death a nod to Ernest Becker’s Escape From Evil, which Schwartz cites as an influence, before the clamorous ‘Peculiar Mostly’ arrives with its dense drama. The tracks are world apart in sound yet very much tied within the Regal Murk aesthetic. Attuned to both individual experience and societal forces, and furthermore how these inform one another to drive the inhospitable conditions of modern living.
Dead Dream Team is out now and you can get it from the Regal Murk Bandcamp page, as is February and March’s EPs, Without the Luxury of Perpetual Lamentation EP and awash EP.