SOUND OF CERES OCTOBER 2

Published on September 30th, 2017

SOUND OF CERES

The sense of location will be hard to miss when Sound of Ceres and Breathers play South Florida this fall. While every band literally occupies an intersection of place and time, these two take the concept a step further — into the imaginary — with music inspired by particular landscapes and periods

Ryan Hover of Sound of Ceres tells PureHoney that his band’s dream-pop sound is very much linked to surroundings.

“When thinking of a direction for a new album, the first thing I think about is its landscape,” Hover, raised in Colorado but now based in Brooklyn, writes in an email interview. “With our previous band, Candy Claws, we did the ocean, the forest, and even the Mesozoic. With Sound of Ceres, we’ve done outer space and caves, and now the snowy peaks of the Alps and the glaciers of Iceland.”

BREATHERS

The Iceland reference is a nod to the creation of “The Twin,” the new Sound of Ceres album produced by the Reykjavik-based American musician Alex Somers, who has given new tracks such as “Gemini Scenic” more jagged sonic contours as compared to the blissful, ’60s-pop layering of the band’s 2016 debut, “Nostalgia for Infinity.”

“We actually made a ‘finished’ version of the album that was sonically similar to ‘Nostalgia,’ ” Hover explains. Then came Somers, “who remade it in his studio in Reykjavik,” Hover writes, “replacing some instrumentation, sending our small vintage rhythm box beats through layers of overdrive, and working with [bandmate and spouse] Karen Hover on extensive abstract backing vocals.”

TURTLE GRENADE

“In a way, Alex has made a strange Twin of the original album, and I’d attribute that new primal feeling to him and the influence of the stark Icelandic surroundings,” Hover writes.

For Breathers, a shrewd and witty synth-pop trio from Atlanta, the fascination is with time — specifically the great electronic pop outburst of the 1980s. From clapping electro beats to plush keys, Breathers are re-deploying vintage sounds for songs that aren’t retro so much as refracted: They’re a way of understanding our present time — and our nostalgia — through the technologies that were supposed to point us toward a glorious future.

Sound of Ceres, Breathers and Turtle Grenade perform Oct. 2 at Voltaire in West Palm Beach. ~ Sean Piccoli