Day #18 of the May Month of Madness Marathon for NZ Music Month is “June” from the strange, melancholy, reverberating world of Anto Pascoe.
This weird but wonderful combination of reverb-drenched lo-fi keyboard pop-noir seems to channel equal parts East River Pipe, Galaxie 500 and early Beach House. There’s some guitar in here too, but it sounds like it’s being played in a concrete basement, a flight of stairs away from the microphone.
The album, called “To Escape”, is a cassette release from Christchurch label Melted Ice Cream. It’s great. Anto’s voice – often rising to a ghostly falsetto – and the sparse instrumentation blurred and softened by almost infinite delay, all add an enervated, washed out melancholy that’s much more fun than it might sound.
Pop Lib 