Dreampop duo widen horizons
WHO?
Made up of Lauren Green and Marissa Macias, Tan Cologne are a duo from New Mexico, offering a type of gothic dreampop that registers somewhere in the intersection between the ambient drift pop of Julia Holter, Galaxie 500’s wistful slowcore and the bittersweet hooks of Mazzy Star. After their debut, ‘Cave Vaults On The Moon In New Mexico’, their follow-up, ‘Earth Visions Of Water Spaces’, expands that evocative aesthetic into wide, technicolour vistas draped in ethereal guitar and kissed by their pristine voices.
WHY TAN COLOGNE?
It’s these vocals that radiate Tan Cologne’s emotive heart. Moving between the hazy echo of tracks such as ‘Strange God’ and the spectral melancholy of ‘New Dune’, their first record shares understandable common ground with the likes of Cocteau Twins and Broadcast. On their follow-up, however, these delicate drifts have hardened into a low-key shoegaze masterpiece. ‘Floating Gardens’ wraps chiming guitars around haunting vocals, while ‘Heretic Porcelain’ wouldn’t sound out of place on Slowdive’s ‘Souvlaki’.
TELL US MORE…
The duo’s vivid artistic vision is not restricted to music and pervades their other creative interests. Besides various solo visual projects, the pair also collaborate on Psychic Sink, a platform for multidisciplinary artists to perform and release their work. What’s most striking, however, is the sense of landscape that exudes from their work. Pescetrullo is an Italian architectural project set among olive groves, where Tan Cologne completed an artistic residency that saw their lush reverberations and subtly underlying weirdness provide a perfect match for the oddly coloured structures nestling in the reds and browns of the Ostuni countryside.
‘Earth Visions Of Water Spaces’ is out on Labrador
