New York, NY (Top40 Charts) Cigar Cigarette, the solo project of producer, sound engineer, and multi-instrumentalist Chris McLaughlin, released a "love" song today about extractive capitalism, social media and their success at distorting our reality. Cigar Cigarette says about Video Age, "Whether we all merge with machines in the future or end up destroying the planet and fighting with sticks and stones, I imagine people looking back at this time as the era of the screen. Video Age is about surveying our current period from the next one and recognizing how our reality became fuzzy, distorted and warped. I wrote Video Age a long time ago, but it's surprising because now many of us find ourselves truly living most of our lives via video. We've moved into the hazy and distorted world of video conference weddings and funerals."
Read the latest pieces on Cigar Cigarette via Ghettoblaster Magazine and Look At My Records!
His upcoming debut EP, Cigar Cigar Cigar Cigarette is an industrial-tinged alternative soundscape guided by anxious, apocalyptic mystique as much as it is by McLaughlin's wide-spanning ear and expansive vision. Boasting ten years of production and engineering work ranging from Kanye West and Justin Vernon of Bon Iver to Fabrizio Moretti of The Strokes' machinegum collective and a recent Neon Indian remix, McLaughlin's solo debut is a strange and stirring collection of songs that calls to mind The Smiths and The Virgins if they played on the ashes of a fallen city.
Rooted in distorted guitar amplifications and ominous synthesizer the songs on Cigar Cigar Cigar Cigarette are seething with anxiety and urgency. McLaughlin's project may serve as a respite amid the chaos, but his ethos remains generous as his production work, rooted in aiding and uplifting the voices of other musicians and participating actively in the fight against the oppressive forces at hand, including taking part in a compilation put out by Rough Trade in support of the Black Visions Collective.
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