Portland’s Stevhen Peters is embracing his birth name as a neat and easy way to get talked about online. Prior to the switch, Stevhen was creating and existing under the name Shopping Spree – a tenure spanning a few years, a killer split with Celestial Shore, and a few albums. All of it balmy, noisy, pop-centric music. The sweet stuff.
Stevhen leaked another peak into Is Here And Not Here, a self-released cassette out June 30th through SP’s Bandcamp titled “At The Mall.” “Like most of the album,” Stevhen says, “is about the emotional relationships we develop with personal objects.” The track, dreary and pitched like tired, cartoonish depictions of should and shouldn’t, deals with a “you need this” “I want that” conflict that pops up while window shopping – at the mall or on your screen. The moment that Stevhen says is pretty cool: “it comes with a flash of hope for who you might become when you wear it; it isn’t about the shirt itself, but about the hypothetical better-you who wears it.” And with the phone-in-face consumerist reality most live in, it’s a daily, maybe hourly occurrence. Punk is a market, Indie is a market, DIY is a market and it’s all at the mall. “I don’t know, advertising is weird.”
Stevhen Peters’ new tape is called Is Here And Not Here and SP is self-releasing it on cassette on June 30th.
• Stevhen Peters: https://soundcloud.com/stevhenpeters
• Stevhen Peters: https://stevhenpeters.bandcamp.com
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