So this is what it looks like, when someone’s common roots are piled up, doused in gasoline and set on fire, until there’s nothing left but a tiny heap of psychedelic ashes from what used to be post-punk and goth. It’s the perfect breeding ground for two creative people like Aaron Coyes and Indra Dunis to use their combined experiences in order to create something new. Having grown up on two different continents, Aaron and Indra have met for the single purpose of falling in love with each other – and now, with 936, they’ve created the perfect soundtrack for the circumstances of their meeting. In short: Echoing beat-complexity meets mysterious and anonymous vocals. They vaguely knew each other before, so it’s only more or less incidental that the protagonists of this love story meet one night in a whirlpool and decide to make common cause. After Aaron goes on tour with the Rahdunes and Indra with the Numbers, the couple decide to leave San Francisco’s Bay Area and move to cold Wisconsin. Aaron has difficulties to adjust to the new climate, and so he spends lots of time fiddling with analog sounds in their shared hobby-room. And since they don’t have enough gas-money for a trip to Texas, they simply found the project Peaking Lights. 936 is not only their first corporate record, but also the result of a controlled dealing with fears and limitations. Both protagonists move from their natural habitat and challenge each other. Indra learns to improvise and Aaron develops his songwriting-skills further and learns how to make music within firmer structures. The songs on their debut meet somewhere in between all that, and radiate Lo-Fi through and through, beautifully illustrated in All The Sun the Shines, accentuated by rising organ-rhythms and basslines. Aaron Coyes really is a virtuoso and lives his life according to the philosophy that everything has its very own sound. No matter whether it’s rain in San Franciso or falling snow in Wisconsin, the Peaking Lights manage to give these natural occurrences a fitting soundtrack, in which they don’t sound any less organic than in their true nature. Hence, it’s not surprising that 936 has many moments of melancholy in its over all running, and mediates the adequate languishment for the Christmas holidays. It’s the combination of Coyes’ echoing Lo-Fi experiments and Dunis’ ethereal, yet expressive, voice, which creates the album’s hypnotic-psychedelic allurement. A sleepy undercurrent, a dialogue that floatingly combines pop and dub with the ashes of the couple’s musical past.
936
