FOREVER ERA is a new band featuring Yukio Murata (My Way My Love), Adam Reach (The Poison Arrows, Pink Avalanche), and Justin Sinkovich (The Poison Arrows, Acquaintances, Atombombpocketknife, Thumbnail). If you are familiar with The Poison Arrows and My Way My Love, imagine these bands deconstructing their framework into a dizzying array of sequencers, drum machines, samplers, synthesizers, and experimentations with their more typical drums, guitars, and vocals providing the final aesthetic layers, all being shared back and forth across time zones.
“Patterns Per Partition” is the opening track taken from their debut self-titled album that was released in May via Chicago based label File 13 Records.
Comments Justin Sinkovich: “The Covid lockdown postponed my band The Poison Arrows’ album that we had scheduled to release and our Europe and US tours that we had booked to support the album. I wanted to work on something musically while stuck at home so I started putting together new music on drum machines, keyboards, and guitars.”
“I worked with my Poison Arrows bandmate Adam Reach for several tracks with him playing drums including “Patterns Per Partition.” He also had created the pulsing Suicide-esque sequencer, so the backbone of this track really starts with Adam. I recorded him playing two drum kits and panned them on the left and right sides. I added the keyboards and the high guitars with the wah pedal.
Then I sent a few tracks including this one to my friend Yukio Murata who was locked down in Tokyo at the time. He very quickly sent all of the tracks back with additions that took them all to a completely different level. Yukio stays busy as a musician and producer, and I had never made music with him before, but he seemed to have time to work on music, and his additions sounded so cool, so I kept sending him batches of songs and he ended up co-producing every track on the album. Yukio added the chorus vocals and the heavy noise guitar on Patterns Per Partition which really pulled the song together into something interesting, chaotic, but also cohesive.”
““Patterns Per Partition” was the first track completed for the album.” – he continues. “It’s also track 1 in the album’s sequence because it’s the most immediate and best representation of this new project, being the most collaborative between Adam, Yukio, and me.
For the video, we were all still in Covid isolation, me splitting my time in Chicago and the woods of Galena Illinois. Adam was in Chapel Hill North Carolina, and Yukio was in Tokyo. The theme “Patterns Per Partition” came from the new reliance on the video grid of humans that I was only interacting with professionally and socially on Zoom every day, then you can hear a lot of references capturing the anxiety and unknown of that period of the pandemic.
I asked Adam and Yukio to play to the song in an interesting way and record the video on their phones. I did the same and then I edited a rough cut and realized I wasn’t very good at editing video, so our friend Colin Cubr did the final edit. As DIY as the video is, the footage for the video being pieced together from three different time zones fits the theme of the song and the production process for the album sd s whole quite nicely.”
The Poison Arrows postponed their new album and touring in the spring/summer of 2020, guitarist/vocalist Justin Sinkovich (The Poison Arrows, Acquaintances, Atombombpocketknife, Thumbnail) relocated to a house in the woods about 3 hours from Chicago for over a year, and started constructing tracks for a new project. As the project took shape, Justin messaged his long-time friend and File 13 label mate Yukio Murata (My Way My Love, Inoran, The Mortal) in Tokyo to contribute. Yukio dove into every track, quickly becoming a co-producer and member. Adam Reach (The Poison Arrows, Pink Avalanche) had also moved from Chicago to Chapel Hill, NC, and provided foundational sequencers and live drum tracks on several key tracks remotely as well. A couple of songs were quietly revealed on streaming services as the album was completed.
If you are familiar with The Poison Arrows and My Way My Love, imagine these bands deconstructing their framework into a dizzying array of sequencers, drum machines, samplers, synthesizers, and experimentations with their more typical drums, guitars, and vocals providing the final aesthetic layers, all being shared back and forth across time zones.
The debut self-titled LP from Forever Era is a unique and frenetic one.
The opening track “Patterns Per Partition” starts with a dizzying array of dueling guitars, keyboards, and vocals from both Yukio and Justin on top of a Suicide-inspired sequencer and multiple drum kits from Adam. Track 2 “Subject Fell” follows suit with more of a reliance on the live drum kits and samplers. The record meanders into a more drum machine-driven affair for the remainder of side A. Keyboards drip with space echo and distortion on “Bluetooth Séance” and “Medieval Path” striking a symbiotic between chaos, darkness, and melody to provide a platform for Justin’s swaggered spoen word. And then “ADAT Hit” could almost end up at a retro IDM night, but not quite. Its title references the antiquated Alesis Digital Audio Tape (ADAT) tech that chained recorders that recorded on VHS tapes and were quite prevalent in sutdios in the 90s if you can imagine such barbaric technology. From there, side B of the album toggles from more analog elements back to more electronics, and from instrumentals to intermittent vocals.
