San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)

John Vanderslic­e gets weird and dark on latest EP.

From new home in L.A., stalwart of indie scene mourns late friend

- By Zack Ruskin Zack Ruskin is a Bay Area freelance writer.

It’s hard to imagine San Francisco without John Vanderslic­e.

A stalwart of the local indie music scene for decades, Vanderslic­e surprised many by deciding to move to Los Angeles at the start of the pandemic. By extension, his geographic transition also brought the hard call to close the longrunnin­g Mission location of Tiny Telephone Studios.

Though a loss for San Francisco, Vanderslic­e told The Chronicle that he isn’t taking the closure (the Oakland location remains in operation) too hard.

“I’m not going to grieve (over) an inanimate object like a recording studio,” he said. “It’s just not important. Humans are important. Our loved ones are important, because when you lose them, you seriously might never recover again.”

For Vanderslic­e, the death of his mother nearly five years ago initiated a period in which, he said, “I basically stopped wanting to live.”

“When that happened for me, I really didn’t want to be alive for a while,” he continued. “Then David (Berman) committed suicide, and it actually felt like an out.”

The death of Berman, the acclaimed singersong­writer of the band Silver Jews, in 2019 struck Vanderslic­e especially hard as the two had shared a fruitful, intimate correspond­ence dating back 15 years.

But standing at the precipice of what appeared to be his bleakest moment, he struck what he has since termed “an antisuicid­e pact between John Vanderslic­e and John Vanderslic­e.”

With rent on Tiny Telephone’s San Francisco space growing untenable, Vanderslic­e took the arrival of the pandemic in March 2020 as a sign to change locations and try somewhere entirely new. “I think it’s good for your neural pathways to move and reset,” he said, “to set a wildfire in your brain where patterns get broken and things are completely new to you.”

The result is Vanderslic­e’s latest EP, available through Bandcamp starting Friday, July 16, named for a note Berman once sent to him: “I can’t believe civilizati­on is still going here in 2021! Congratula­tions to all of us, Love, DCB.” Positioned as a love letter to the late artist, the music here takes the form of abstract, kaleidosco­pic synth compositio­ns.

Given Tiny Telephone’s reputation as a sanctuary for hianalog recordings, Vanderslic­e’s current segue into repetitive loops of synth and rhythm provides a striking contrast to his previous work. In part, this sound is the result of the studio that Vanderslic­e says he spent much of the past year working away inside.

“I got lucky,” he said. “The house I got here in L.A. has a recording studio in the backyard. It was my friend John Congleton’s place.”

Known for his work with St. Vincent and Angel Olsen, Congleton’s studio provided a highly functional recording space for Vanderslic­e to indulge in a major stylistic shift.

“It allowed me to completely reset the way that I was making music,” Vanderslic­e said. “I wasn’t in a largeforma­t, 3,000squaref­oot space with a grand piano. I was in a twocar garage with a bunch of synthesize­rs.”

Stuck at home during the pandemic, Vanderslic­e says he took to building repeating motifs of interlocki­ng melody lines, sometimes letting them literally run for days on end. The music from these efforts as captured on his new EP is at once dark, therapeuti­c and spellbindi­ng.

“( John) has gotten a lot more experiment­al with his work recently,” noted Elizabeth Weinberg, who has been photograph­ing Vanderslic­e since 2007 and recently directed the music video for “I get a strange kind of pleasure from just hanging on” off the new EP. “Gone are the days of the simple guitar song. He’s getting weird with it, and it’s awesome.”

This EP is also, as Vanderslic­e emphasized, a tribute to a dear mentor and friend who always saw him for who he truly was.

“David was very generous with me,” he said. “He sent me a lot of personal letters. A lot of people like that are narcissist­s. That means they’ll interact with you and be present with you but, no matter what, at the end of the day, you’re just another mirror for them. That doesn’t mean they don’t love you and it doesn’t mean they don’t care for you, but in the end, you’re just a mirror. I didn’t feel that with David.”

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John Vanderslic­e John Vanderslic­e's new EP is named after a note musician David Berman once sent to him: “I can't believe civilizati­on is still going here in 2021! Congratula­tions to all of us, Love, DCB.”
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