Mother Engine by Amiture Music

BIO:
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."

PRESS:

“This is a trip-hop scorcher for love addicts with daddy issues.”

-E.R. Pulgar for Pitchfork

“The Amiture formula is as follows: one part skittering, industrial breakbeats; one part New Romantics gothicism; and another of buzzsaw blues guitar—it shouldn’t work but it does. Darker, seedier, and sexier than previous EPs, Mother Engine sees the NYC duo of Jack Whitescarver and Coco Goupil honing in on their particular sound. If you are to listen to one track let it be “Billy’s Dream,” a lurid, skulking nightprowler of a song that lives somewhere between Nick Cave’s “Red Right Hand,” The Cramps’s “Human Fly,” and Prodigy’s “Breathe.” […] Never forget that goths can party too.”

-Stephanie Barclay for Bandcamp Daily

“From the spaghetti western guitar licks of opening song “Glory,” Mother Engine finds the band embarking on a road movie through the darkest human impulses, depicted through both aesthetics that intertwine expressionist abstraction and a kind of classic Americana romanticism.”

-Jeff Terich for Treble Zine

“Dirty,” the latest single from their forthcoming album Mother Engine, takes things in a no-wavier direction, with Jack Whitescarver’s vocals quavering on the verge of sounding like Jamie Stewart—among a few other, less expected influences.

-Mike Lesuer for FLOOD“Jack Whitescarver and Coco Goupil return as Amiture with the follow-up to their synth-heavv 2021 debut "The Beach'. This album is much darker and weightier than its predecessor, with the unsettling apprehension of 'Billy's Dream' and the prickly guitar roars of Baby' evoking the likes of fellow New Yorkers, Sonic Youth. A sense of individuality is still very much at play though, particularly in Whitescarver's vocals, which billow over rattling rhythms and guttural bass lines like thick, twisting smoke trails across a cloud-filled sky.”

-Electronic Sound Magazine

”Jack Whitescarver and Coco Goupil's robust and pastoral sound mixes electronic drums with blues guitar to create something a little industrial and a little bit rural; like Nine Inch Nails if Trent Reznor kicked back on the patio. On their debut album Mother Engine, Amiture decamped to upstate New York and got lost in a thicket of samplers, amps, turntables, and more equipment to create their dense, gloopy take on wistful Americana; whatever they found in the greenery suits them. […] Their work on Mother Engine, whether it's adding sleek grooves or jagged edges where necessary, elevates the album from genre splicing into something standalone and eminently replayable.”

-David Renshaw for The FADER


THANKS:

Jack would like to thank:
Tom Moore for his evergreen support, Cyrus, Sabrina, Jess, Frank, Jizzy, Ori and everyone upstate, Lauren Anderson for helping me get up there, my dad and Marcy, Paco, Sasha, Matt, Tommy, Carolyn, Henry, Andrew Wallace for all the stoned nights, Anna and Gwen, Finn for his inspiration on Swamp, Kate Bickhardt for making us laugh, Owen, David, Reg, Angelina and Lexi, Liam for believing in the future, Julian for the dreams, Macy, Carl, Katie, Pansy, Everyone who was patient with us. Cody DeFalco, Justin and Max, Scott Vander Veen I couldn’t begin to say.

Coco would like to thank:
Gay Feldman and Pascal Goupil; Tilly, David Satyr, Kristian Pitaccio, Mikee the Baker, Donna and Trixie, Quentin and Nora, Lorette, Louïs and Sammy; The Suminski Innski for its shelter, mischief, and guidance; Tim and Ryan, Doug Stone for his antics and encouragement; the gay kickball team and the Devil’s Anus; Lauren Anderson for the studio connection; Matt Norman, Carolyn, Henry Birdsey, Tommy G, Paco, Sasha, Cody DeFalco, Max and Justin, Tom Moore for his support and passion; Cyrus, Jizzy, Owen, and Tristan; the town of Tivoli and the people who live there. Thank you all for your encouragement.


Matt would like to thank:
Brigid Slattery

xoxoxoxoxoxoxox

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