Originating as the solo project of Hunter Prueger, but soon expanding into an eight-piece band, Austin-based experimental folk outfit Middle Sattre occupies an interesting space between the personal and the communal. Debut full-length Tendencies is an intimate and searching examination of Prueger’s own experiences, but the record was brought to life by a vibrant team of musicians and artists including Andrew Murray, Casey Boyer, S. Wallace, Mitch Stevens, Hannah Marks, Noah Simon, Jordan Walsh, Shelby Mars, Amanda Achen, Macall Potter, Annelyse Gelman, Gus Ritchart, Austin Ali and Jessy Eubanks.
This style was typified by first single ‘Pouring Water’, a song which “lands somewhere between Sufjan Stevens and Typhoon,” as we wrote in a preview, “where collaboration brings a immersive richness to the sound but never occludes the intimate lyricism at the track’s heart.” This summation stands for the Middle Sattre sound more generally. A collaboration which serves to better help mine specific experiences, and thus invoke a more universal human experience.
Nodding to an Andy Akiho piece of the same name, latest single ‘Stop Speaking’ uses a specific moment as a metaphor for a wider truth. Prueger auditioned at BYU on saxophone, only for the reeds of the instrument to dry up and fail to make a sound, and the song uses experience this to explore how silence can be pivotal or even favourable. Especially when what otherwise might be said is loaded with cruelty. Having grown up gay in the Mormon church, Prueger uses Tendencies to work through ideas of guilt, shame and complicity, and ‘Stop Speaking’ directly calls out the merciless attitudes of many religious and conservative figureheads. The single “is one of the more Utah-specific songs I have,” as Prueger explains, “but it’s ultimately about the harmful language people use to talk about queer people. It references several anti-LGBTQ stances, announcements, proclamations, practices, and speeches from church leaders and politicians.”
[bandcamp width=100% height=120 album=725263850 size=large bgcol=ffffff linkcol=0687f5 tracklist=false artwork=small track=4217138673]
Accompanying single ‘Pornography’ pushes further into the murky world of such attitudes, where a pseudo-virtue is found to bely an underlying impropriety. Similar themes cropped up in the recent Maple Glider record, I Get into Trouble. Where supposedly pious men bend their dogma towards creeping perversity. “I can recall more than a few instances where an adult sexualized a child in the name of modesty or chastity,” as Prueger continues. “‘Pornography’ recounts two of those instances—one on a youth trip and one at a high school musical. It was usually men in their forties and fifties talking about teenage and pre-teen girls, but no-one was really immune to that kind of gaze.”
[bandcamp width=100% height=120 album=725263850 size=large bgcol=ffffff linkcol=0687f5 tracklist=false artwork=small track=791627438]
Tendencies is out on the 9th February and you can pre-order it now from the Middle Sattre Bandcamp page.
