New York’s Backyard Ritual Capture Vast Electronic Illusions in “Circumstance”

NYC-based electronic project Backyard Ritual have just released their debut cassette, the aptly named Small World. Backyard Ritual is the solo moniker of Pop. 1280’s Ian Campbell, who formed the project as a means to capture what was happening in the spaces just outside the window. The album is a departure from Pop. 1280’s angular, post-punk/industrial maelstrom. Instead, Backyard Ritual tap into the same dreamy electronic energy as Graham Lewis’ post-Wire project He Said and Factory’s The Royal Family & the Poor, to name a few. Campbell’s unsettling croon sits on top of stretched-out electronic passages, with minimal synthetic melodies blurring together in unison.

Lead single “Circumstance” is a beautiful fever dream, driven by gentle, yet-sharp percussion, a Harold Budd-esque piano line and Campbell’s vocals, which arrive almost halfway through the track. “Circumstance” comes to a gentle, but eerie conclusion, washing away in warm, textured synth pads before disappearing back into the ether from which it came, a subtle but successful turn that’s delightfully disorienting. The video, conceptualized and directed by Frankie Rose (Dum Dum Girls, Crystal Stilts, Vivian Girls), taps into a similar dream space that compliments the track perfectly.

Campbell offers these words on Backyard Ritual’s beginnings and  the writing of “Circumstance”:

“‘Small World” came about after a break from touring with other projects where I was left to my own devices at home, excited to work on music, but drawn to more ambient and minimal forms. Most of my projects have existed in a louder, heavier space, and I wanted to explore something that sounded a little calmer and smaller and this album is what came out of that.”

“Circumstance” started as an instrumental piece that remained around the album even as I added and subtracted songs.  One night I was working on it and I heard a documentary that my wife was watching about Saxon villages being raided by Vikings coming through the wall.  For whatever reason this narrator came into the song who went to sleep one night in their bed and awoke in one of these raids, completely lost and confused and out of time.  This completed the song for me.  I asked Frankie to make a video and the only direction I felt I could give was to make the video have a dreamlike quality.  She took that small non-idea and made a beautiful wash of images that summed up the feeling of the song perfectly.

Check out the video for “Circumstance” below, and check Bandcamp for a link to purchase Small World on cassette:

Backyard Ritual – Small World
1. A Nagging Sense
2. Interboro
3. Bide My Time
4. Circumstance
5. RFP
6. Amateur Journalist
7. Grasping at Straws
8. Proxy
9. Exit Interview