Stephen Becker - Nothing Sun Under The New [Cassette]

Nothing Sun Under the New—the title of Stephen Becker’s new EP of bedroom-spun songs—expresses exactly the kind of poetic sleights-of-hand we encounter throughout this short, brilliant offering from the Brooklyn songwriter. Becker fills this compact record with aphorisms flipped on their heads, reversals of logic and intuition, dislocations of causality and expectation. He finds a joyful sense of confusion in all the little contradictions of our daily lives, and these shards of irony take on a kind of intimacy when wrapped in a blanket of synthesizers, spun around a water wheel of modulating chord changes, and shot through with pulsing drum machines and sudden bursts of noise. The music churns the songwriter’s ambivalence into revelation, his confusion into reverie, and his words into invitations—asking us to see what’s right in front of us as something strangely new.