Lineup 2015
Doldrums
Montreal, QC
Doldrums is lead by 25 year old musician Airick Woodhead, currently out with new album The Air Conditioned Nightmare on Sub Pop. On the follow-up to the 2013 debut Lesser Evil, the DJ, producer and performer makes a sizeable leap from being darling of the same fertile Montreal warehouse creative explosion that gave the world the likes of Grimes, Majical Cloudz, Blue Hawaii to simply being a stand-alone artist and composer on the cusp of something quite special.
Doldrums craft musical montages, paint sonic pictures from a new palette, construct sounds using Airick’s own unique architectural blueprint. They apply a punk rock ethos to electronic music, creating songs using samplers and DJ gear in place of guitars. Bold, anxious, dream-like, uplifting, glacial, hypnotic, constricting, expansive, alien – this is an album that is ever-changing. “Conflict is at the heart of this album,” explains Airick. “There’s a lot of paranoid sentiment and Dystopian imagery in there. The threat of a mundane reality ties it together, as does an obsession with plasticity. Songs come from specific feelings or images. Anxiety is my default state.”