Videos
INTRODUCING: APOSTILLE
Today Upset The Rhythm has announced the new record from Apostille, the solo electronic project of Glasgow-based Michael Kasparis (of Anxiety, The Lowest Form and founder of Night School Records), along with a string of UK live dates.
Entitled ‘Choose Life’, the album is set for release on June 8th and today the first track and accompanying video, “Feel Bad” have made their online debut.
The track sees Kasparis sounding more himself than ever. Nothing is cloaked in reverb, obscured or distorted, this is Apostille in the broad daylight, ambitious, open-armed and vulnerable. “If there’s something I know, it’s that I’ll see you again, I’m losing everything I know, I would walk into the ocean just to give you a rest” confesses Kasparis in his sleek setting of glossy drum programming and buoyant refrains in the melancholic key. This is pop music as redemption, the drawing of a line, songs that step anew unto the dawn.
“Feel Bad was written about transcending a negative experience, ecstasy through living bad” Kasparis explains. “The video was to be stark but warm, people in a room, together. I wanted something completely false in set up – a bunch of people dancing and miming to a song, but I wanted to see if you can get something transcendent and warm while looking directly at the makings of it. Mostly I wanted to test how uncomfortable people, including me, can get before losing their inhibitions.”
Apostille is a man who’s torn through enough sound-systems to know the difference between gesture and meaning. Alongside running his own DIY record label (Night School Records), Glasgow native, Michael Kasparis has spent the last few years making forays into the realm of hardcore punk with his groups Anxiety and The Lowest Form. Throughout all this, his solo electronic venture, Apostille has continued to evolve with each twist and turn of the world. What started off as a quest to whip up a mood and force that into a song has steadily become more of a mission in communication. His audacious 2015 debut album ‘Powerless’, self-released through Night School, set the template by hooking up his honest delivery to some manic expositions in electronic pop. At once minimal and courageous with intent to connect, Apostille songs race off with unchecked abandon, skittering drum machines, thick walls of sequenced synth and decidedly elastic basslines. The resultant live shows noted for their frenzy and ragged vision, soon left Kasparis wanting to reach out in a more imaginative way than through volume and conflict.
‘Choose Life’ is both the album Apostille chose to make and had to make. He dialled down the clown, built up a new-found confidence in his voice and melody in general and began to feel more at home in the refuge of Pop music (with a capital P).
As Kasparis explains “Choose Life began as a chronicle of a bad time. Many of the songs were written as some sort of catharsis, an escape from a tumultuous couple of years. The album title was intended as ironic at first but as the writing process went on the album began to feel more playful, I was finding revelatory threads in it I hadn’t intended. Choose Life became an imperative.”
All the truest pop music speaks to us of escape and through this new album, Apostille allows its transformative power to fully manifest. It’s an album full of life and energy, as disobedient as it is heroic in its pursuit of liberation.
‘Choose Life’ is out on June 8th via Upset The Rhythm and is available to pre-order here.
Apostille UK live dates:
May 26th – London, The Victoria
May 27th – Brighton, The Pipeline
May 28th – Cardiff, The Undertone
May 31st – Leeds, Wharf Chambers
June 2nd – Glasgow, The Art School