Billy’s Dream” is likely our most mangled and sculpted track. It’s a distilled example of our process of recording long jams and remixing them into shorter songs- finding 1-4 second moments that sound good and reconfiguring them like a collage. By the time we made this, the way we wrote had as much to do with listening as playing. We sampled this break that Matt drummed sort of off the cuff, that’s the main drum pattern, and sang this rhyme scheme over it. Coco basically made it what it is by infusing all the guitar textures into it- building a really complex field of sound. Lyrically it’s a story we all know: a man wants to destroy everything he has, he can’t control himself and he doesn’t know why.

MUSIC VIDEO: https://youtu.be/bEgobGDce6c?si=oYqOszaJy9ueYafD

For “Billy’s Dream,”we wanted to make a video that used that visual world as a point of departure but was also grounded in a concrete situation. We came up with the idea of a bar, “the Safehouse,” where a group of people gathers for mysterious reasons. The idea is that everyone here was involved in the past in something intense and illicit, not necessarily in the sense that they’re friends, but they’ve shared something together that isolates them from other people. This sense of closeness in the Safehouse anchors the video, and we see all the characters both inside and standing outside the front door, where they are observed by a mysterious pair of detectives. Cut in with this Safehouse footage, we see images of everyone in their “private lives,” in private rooms, doing what they do when they’re alone.

The song tells the story of a mysterious, tortured and alienated character, Billy Lamb. In this video, everyone you see is Billy. It’s about community and common trauma, the feeling of having shared a painful experience you can’t get back—an experience that made you feel more alive than anything else ever will.

The video was shot on 16mm film by DP Owen Smith-Clark. We used a unique exposure and processing cocktail to create thick, dark and highly textured images. Our key reference was the painter Eduoard Vuillard, whose murky mid-career portraits demonstrate a command of gesture and type that we attempted to emulate throughout.

The intimate and absurd of world of Billy’s Dream is scaffolded not only by the quaility of film used, but by the hand of producer JZ Tinneny. From each moving piece she evoked a skewed sense of humor.

Costume Designer Reg Melady worked with stylist Andrew Wallace to source clothes that fit into and further defined the world of the video. We found we liked browns and yellows, bowling shirts and suede jackets, dark suits and terrycloth robes. The overall effect is a little retro but weirdly timeless.

In the edit, I used AI video to create additional characters, further refracting the alienated essence of the song’s central character.

Amiture is Jack Whitescarver & Coco Goupil. Their sound blends underground dance music, R&B, British folk, and the blues in a deeply personal way. Positioned between New York City’s nighttime world and the pastoral isolation of upstate New York, Amiture is defined by their shapeshifting playfulness as much as their emotional intensity.

Whitescarver and Goupil were involved in music their whole lives and briefly performed in a band together in college before taking separate paths as visual artists. It wasn’t until 2021, when the two came back together to flesh out live arrangements for The Beach, that their collaboration really blossomed. Following their reunion, Amiture was reinvented. While the two were originally performing songs that Whitescarver had written alone, Goupil's contribtions quickly exceeded mere arrangements. Goupil's work introduced a sculptural sensibility that changed the band. This is most clearly heard with their reconstruction of “Touch,” which appeared on last summer’s EP Swimmer. With a deep trip-hop groove and a revolving, passionate, & understated guitar melody. What was once a driven, crooning expression of nostalgia became darker, groovier, and more abstract.

By the time Amiture had rearranged “Touch”, the pieces of the puzzle were coming together. The synthesis of Goupil’s unorthodox guitar stylings with Whitescarver’s heartfelt lyrics proved to be a rich union. Whitescarver relocated to Kingston NY, and the two spent the entirety of 2022 sculpting what would become their debut as a duo, the upcoming LP Mother Engine.

Mother Engine began to take form in a dilapidated garage between a sanitation center and a set of train tracks. This would be their laboratory, workshop, and recording studio where they developed a process of working that included a newfound love for sample manipulation. They collaborated with other musicians including Matt Norman (Lily & Horn Horse) and Henry Birdsey, an experimentalist, to bring their production out of the digital landscape of Ableton. Between the tape machine, the amp, the turntable, and the computer, Amiture found magic. Each song is a part of a complex sonic matrix that reflected a vision and a sound neither one could have procured alone, always centered around Whitescarver’s classically trained voice and Goupil’s gritty, tripped-out-guitar sound, merged and then steeped in the traditions of American guitar music, industrial music, and folk melody.

The results are emotional, at times disturbing. On “Dirty,” Whitescarver sings of a last tryst before a lover’s disappearance: “Before you go and leave this town—I want to taste it one more time.” His aching—a recurrent subject—shifts recklessly from lascivious to desperate, against a thumping electro beat slashed up by jagged guitar picking. “Cocaine” is elegiac and haunting; “He is cocaine—He is cocaine—Just like my father,” Jack’s painfully murmuring his sinister Freudian wordplay next to Goupil’s hard- boiled tremolo. It’s on the frenetic warped blues of “Billy’s Dream” that their sculptural process is put on full display. Built from sampled drum loops and a Goupil’s razor-like scratches of guitar, Whitescarver calmly chants “I need remote control—I’m howling in the hole”. His words spiral into a surge of delay and noise that sounds just like the car “Billy” is running away in. Running away from what? The band is careful to never give too much away, leaving plenty of room to freely enter their world of dark American iconography.

It’s Whitescarver’s first breath on Mother Engine’s opener, “Glory,” that introduces and defines Amiture’s astonishing evolution. “I know my shit is pure,” he cries into a sea of rolling guitars and rattling breakbeats. To imagine what shit Whitescarver is speaking of is to imagine an uncut drug, a passion, a memory, a sense of self that whirlpools Mother Engine. Just as much a question of circumstance as a declaration of truth, the band is ready to share a new kind of Amiture, one that is as open to the possibilities of their unified imagination as they are dedicated to the tools and gestures they have spent so long refining. Whitescarver doesn’t let us forget it, and he says it again, “I know my shit is pure."