Ángel Sánchez, the man behind Seekers Who Are Lovers, has previously released music under the name Antiguo Autómata Mexicano. What I've heard from this project falls in the glitch/dub/minimal techno vein, with carefully constructed rips and blips stretched across a wide, white sonic canvas. Owing something, perhaps, to the relative success of the Nortec Collective generally and Fernando Corona's Murcof in particular, Mexican producers from Tijuana and Mexicali as well as Sánchez's hometown of Monterrey have produced a lot of minimal electronic music.
Seekers Who Are Lovers is a vastly different project for Sánchez, in that it focuses on songs and his voice. Lots of electronic producers decide at some point to work vocals into their music, and many take to the mic themselves; none I've heard possesses the vocal talent of Sánchez. His androgynous croon, which oscillates between masculine and feminine in the manner of artists like Nina Simone and Bryan Ferry, is rich, ethereal and supple. That the name of this project is drawn from a Cocteau Twins track is a further clue to the sonic world Sánchez is after.
The opening cover of Will Oldham's "It's a Hard Life" lays out nicely the boundaries of the project. The simple country shuffle of the original is cast aside in favor of a skipping record and a piercing organ, placing the lament in, say, the center a one-room wooden church being consumed by slow-motion flames. And in the middle of it all stands Sánchez, voicing the lyrics with a pinch of an accent giving the words an extra shot of strangeness. It's a drone piece, with only two real changes of note: one comes when Sánchez elevates "with no wife" by a third halfway through, going from merely dejected to desperately pleading; the other is the cloud of static that moves in like an airborne toxic event over the song's final third. Both are devastating in their simplicity.
The positively radiant "It's a Hard Life" is the EP's easy highlight and the most pop moment on the record; other tracks are almost as good but better listened to with an ear for mood and texture. Where Fernando Corona mixes "It's a Hard Life", Rubén Tamayo of Fax-- Corona's partner in the Static Disco label-- produces and arranges the rest of the EP, pushing the music toward the kind of sensual bleakness that turns David Lynch on. Pedal steel guitars creep in, wisps of synth curl in the air like smoke, the gears of stuttering computers catch to remind us of this world's fundamental uncertainty.
"Modern Heirs" is referentially soulful in a way that reminds me of Brightblack Morning Light, but the lyrics are weird and disorienting. The skipping guitars are reminiscent of Pop Ambient linchpin Klimek, while the track's heartbeat bass pulse is just a remix tweak away from wobbling into a frighteningly stoned downtempo mix. "Cereza", with its nylon acoustic plucks and moonlight-kissed drone, is the record at its most gaseous, the kind of track you might need a secret affinity for Enya to appreciate fully.
But I don't want to sell You Are the Pride of Your Street short; it's moody noir in the extreme, but it never coasts on style alone. There's a lot more going on here than a good record collection, and this EP is one of the most compelling from-nowhere surprises I've heard in a long time. We'll be hearing a lot more from Ángel Sánchez.
