JENNIFER is the avatar adopted for the world of music by Denver’s Zach Spencer, an artist who read an interview with instrumental guitar legend John Fahey in which John did away with the reputation garnered by his own work in one pithy couplet: “cosmic-sentimentalism” he called it.
But that phrase stuck with Zach not as a pejorative, but as a positive; maybe something to take as a banner for a music to explore, in fact. And one he set about creating and arrived at with his new cassette-only longform drone release, SINCERELY, which will be out in the world from Whited Sepulchre on April 23rd.
You can listen to the whole of side A of SINCERELY within; it’s minimalist and womb-music-delish in the grand tradition of LaMonte Young, Stars of the Lid, etc, all filtered through Zach’s long study of Indian and South-East Asian music. Cosmic sentimentalism it sure is.
Prior to this mellow-as voyage, Zach’s been a fixture in Denver’s DIY music community and was a self-proclaimed noise-punk lifer, playing in more than a dozen Skingraft style noise-punk bands in the CD-R-era American underground; but a creative brick wall led to him undertaking an immersive eight-year study of North Indian classical music and the drone outside of a Western context.
SINCERELY was painstakingly put together over six months or so during 2018, a period of intense upheaval personally for Zach and on the wider Denver DIY scene, and exist as a personal gift to Madeline Johnston of Midwife and others devastated at the loss of cherished friends and an artistic community, with the fire department in Denver shuttering Rhinoceropolis, the hub of the scene.
Three years on from it completion this “elegy in the shape of a love letter” is being offered up to the world at large.
JENNIFER’S SINCERELY will be released digitally and on limited edition cassette by Whited Sepulchre Records on April 23rd, but is available to pre-order now over at Bandcamp.
JENNIFER’S SINCERELY PRE-ORDER AVAILABLE OUT 04.23.21 ON WHITED SEPULCHRE RECORDS
STREAM SINCERELY SIDE A (AVAILABLE TO SHARE)
Genre: Ambient, New Age, Experimental
RIYL: Stars of the Lid, LaMonte Young, Mark Banning
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