♫♪  Steve Summers - “Artificial Light”

Letkiewicz-as-Summers

The fine people at Chicago’s CLEAR (USA) have been doing the necessary work of excavating forward-looking, Midwest-centric electronic sounds for a few years now, gifting us a string of low flying, excellent records whose grooves run as heavy as an Illinois winter is flat and cold.

Emerging next from this prairie is prolific producer Jason Letkiewicz (L.I.E.S., Echovolt, Future Times), invoking his Steve Summers pseudonym for CLEAR’s upcoming Artificial Light EP. The label calls this music “post-apocalyptic jack,” which is great and not inaccurate, but in how it perfectly captures a specifically Chicagoan landlocked post-industrial angst we’re also going to suggest “techno rust.”

In fact, strong rusty imagery is on display in the video for the record’s title track. Built from footage shot by label co-head Maria Tzeka, it is a high-grain dreadtrip through snow, brick, the L, and the I-290 out of town. Tiny Mix Tapes is very happy to be premiering the video for you right here, today. Fire it up and have a mood.

Artificial Light is available May 19 in vinyl and digital editions from CLEAR (USA).

Chocolate Grinder

CHOCOLATE GRINDER is our audio/visual section, with an emphasis on the lesser heard and lesser known. We aim to dig deep, but we’ll post any song or video we find interesting, big or small.

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