Michigan-based experimental project Wolf Eyes have announced a new album. Dreams in Splattered Lines arrives May 26 via Warp imprint Disciples, marking the 25th anniversary of the prolific group, currently a duo of Nate Young and John Olson. Along with the announcement, Wolf Eyes have shared three tracks from the LP. Listen to “My Whole Life,” “Engaged Withdrawal,” and “Days Decay” below. Also below, find a trailer for the album.
Dreams in Splattered Lines was recorded following Wolf Eyes’ residency at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. “We had spent a lot of time in NYC during the residency but because of Covid we had limited access to the Library archives,” Wolf Eyes co-founder Nate Young said in a press release. “We would spend 4-5 hours at the library and then go to museums. The Met’s ‘Surrealism Beyond Borders’ exhibit was a huge influence on this record. Learning about the Chicago Surrealists’ spoken-word poetry performed with musicians was inspiring and affirmative. While Surrealism could generate often poetic and even humorous works, it was also taken up as a far more serious weapon in the struggle for political, social, and personal freedom, and by many more artists around the world.
“We started by continuing to explore the ideas of short dense sound collages that had similar behaviors to ‘hit singles.’ Using a lot of ideas that we established on the Difficult Messages series, we started to look at hit songs like terrariums: folding the idea of music and sound happening inside sound environments we created in the studio. The record starts with a Car Wash that includes a Short Hands track playing on the car radio while waves of white noise and contact microphones are plunging into water buckets. The track is then played in a car while going through an actual car wash and finally layered and mixed in the studio.”
John Olson added: “Dreams in Splattered Lines is the latest in Wolf Eyes’ journey into the corners of unknown electronic subterranean worlds. Thirteen tangled stories razor sharp from the duo’s recent Difficult Messages singles foray starting with a unique ‘suite’ from ‘Radio Box’ to ‘Engaged Withdrawl’ and ending with the grim title track, here is Wolf Eyes at their most abstract yet corrupted listening experience yet. For a group that would rather invent genres rather than follow them, Dreams in Splattered Lines is the twisted road that leads another 25 years onward to the unquenchable passion of unknown arcane electronic worlds. Music dreamt in 242 B.C. and horribly born in 20042 A.D.”