Photo courtesy of the artist.
Serguei Spoutnik is the solo project of Damien Lecoq who previously toured Europe with the band QDRPD. His debut EP, Subject, Verb, Complement, was released in 2020 by Santé Records. The record blended introspective ambient textures, 1980s-inspired synths, and spoken word elements.
Transcend, his new album, was conceived during a residency in Reykjavik, Iceland. Over the course of seven days, he met seven local artists, each of whom lent him one of their synthesizers for a day. In exchange, he gave them a camcorder, an obsolete model capturing blurry, shaky images reminiscent of childhood memories. These videos, filmed by strangers in a country he barely knew, nourish the album in a singular way. Through their confusion and imperfection, they establish a subtle link to his personal history, where intimacy, past, and present intertwine and transcend one another.
The music video for “Memory’s Shore” opens on an ambiguous scene: a lone hiker, a loyal dog, a distant Mount Fuji, and the quiet promise of a solitary performance. What first appears natural gradually reveals its own artifice. More than a traditional music video, the piece unfolds as a carefully composed live session, captured in a single take, with Serguei Spoutnik performing voice and guitar live. Blending dream pop, dark wave and downtempo ambient textures, the video deliberately oscillates between apparent realism, with hiking outfit and pastoral codes, and fully assumed fabrication, exposed through the studio backdrop and constructed landscape.
Mirroring the music itself, where vocoded vocals and pre-recorded synthesizers coexist with the live performance, Memory’s Shore reflects on the subtle distortions that shape personal memory. By revisiting these half-real, half-fabricated images of youth, the piece quietly traces the moment when a truer sense of self begins to surface.
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