The new single from the mysterious Seattle-based artist is a tender folk song which eventually disintegrates under its own weight. SloNewsLife makes music from lo-fi recordings, sound collages, samples, and half-broken instruments. This patchwork approach allows for experiments with both time and palace, granting the music a hauntological quality more commonly associated with experimental electronic genres. Their latest single, ‘Time is a Used Car Salesman’, feels porous, as though ghostly presences from other eras and locations are flooding through its seams.
At its heart, the song is pleasingly sparse and traditional. What begins as a delicate folk arrangement — replete with finger-picked guitar and gorgeous vocal harmonies — slowly disintegrates into a wash of ambient squeals and static. As a reflection on grief and the passing of time, the track is fittingly both contemplative and chaotic, equally grounded in earthly instrumentation and spectral abstraction. By the song’s end, the human vocals are subsumed by a ghostly presence marked by decay — a presence, in fact, defined by its very absence. This fusion of traditional stylings and experimental instrumentation calls to mind both Bon Iver’s intimate fragility and The Caretaker’s temporal disintegration. It comes highly recommended for fans of either.
Take a listen to “Time Is a Used Car Salesman” below.
Written by Matthew Wrafter
