Following a series of great production work, such as with Drab Majesty on The Demonstration, and Modern Mirror, Joshua Eustis is back with the first Telefon Tel Aviv album in 10 years, titled Dreams Are Not Enough—which will be out September 27 via Ghostly.
In his video for the album’s second single “A Younger Version of Myself”, Eustis has teamed up with director Lance Drake, and programmer Michail Rybakov, to create an audiovisual piece that captures the angst-ridden zeitgeist of our current relationship with technology.
“A sophisticated AI neural network tracks and selectively erases Telefon Tel Aviv from the transient spaces of the nighttime Los Angeles Landscape…”
“Last autumn I was researching the topic of an organism and its environment, and how to visualize the interconnection between the two. After all, we are made of what we eat, where we live, what tools we use as well as all the non-human entities that live on and in us.
One approach I took was to let the machine find and remove human bodies and let it fill in what it thinks would belong there. As a result, a gooey, trembling, impermanent mass would appear instead of a body, a mass full of sticks and stones, clouds and lights, walls and birds and all the other stuff that surrounds us in our daily lives. In addition, letting the machine decide what constitutes a human body, letting the machine remove what it sees feels… wrong somehow; feels as if Asimov’s three laws of AI are in need of an amendment – ‘You shall not remove those who created you’.” -Michail Rybakov
‘“This is sort of a love letter to the lonely places in LA, a city that is overrun with humanity but still full of emptiness and a sort of hard underbelly that isn’t really seen unless it’s sought out. It seemed an appropriate backdrop for the socio-political commentary of the song, since the loneliness resulting from the farce of American individualism and our current post-capitalist dread are consistent daily counterweights to happiness and peace for far too many, while we also grapple with our own personal issues.” – Joshua Eustis [Telfon tel Aviv]
Watch the video for “A Younger Version of Myself” below
Order ‘Dreams Are Not Enough’ at Ghostly, or at the retailer of your choice: Here
Telefon Tel Aviv – 2019 Tour Dates
- 10.16 – Brooklyn, NY @ National Sawdust
- 10.17 – Nashville, TN @ Exit/In
- 10.19 – Miami, FL @ Floyd
- 11.09 – Los Angeles, CA @ The Masonic Lodge
- 11.27 – St. Petersburg, RU @ Zal Tix
- 11.29 – Moscow, RU @ Teatr
- 11.30 – Ekaterinburg, RU @ Dom Pechati
