Chanel Beads Forages A Dream

On one of those gray downpour days in New York, I’m set to meet Shane Lavers, the mind behind the neoclassical avant-rock project Chanel Beads. I get a text from him: “No electricity” and then “Here.” He and his longtime collaborator/bandmate Maya McGrory, aka Colle, have just been handed the keys to a third-floor walkup in Greenpoint. “Thought it might have been turned on by now.” In the hazy, somnambulist world the new Chanel Beads album invokes, an empty, unlit, parquet-floored railroad apartment sets the scene improbably well. His new album, Your Day Will Come, out April 19 on Jagjaguwar, starts with “Dedicated To The World,” which has the lyrics: “It’s happening / Saw it in a dream / I saw it all end / For you / Is it gonna rain again.” At this moment, it seems the rain will never stop.

Chanel Beads does not have many immediate spiritual antecedents–maybe if James Ferraro had left New York for Vienna, or Alan Vega had been friendlier with Arthur Russell–but this moody day recalls the lyrical structure and production approach of “After the Flood,” the opening track on Talk Talk’s Laughing Stock. Shane’s in a sweater vest, talking into a yellow rotary phone connected to nothing. “I think I have a limited palette, as far as melodies and emotions go,” he says. “It’s the same feeling that comes out in different songs.” Your Day Will Come sounds like it could be one long suite, one exploration of a persistent idea. “I don’t think I’ve fully exercised the idea that I’m exploring here,” Shane says.

Within that unity of the project, there are not many contemporaries similar to Chanel Beads — the androgynous vocals, punchy percussion samples, occasional Moby-esque groove, slappy bass, “fake jazz,” all twisted into an atmosphere that exalts absence as much as overabundance. Shane thinks the lack of ambient innovation comes from imitation: “I feel like there are a lot of people who approach music like, okay, now it’s my turn,” he muses. He’s changing clothes in his otherwise empty bedroom, singing the song “Radiation” by LUCY quietly to himself. “It’s been stuck in my head lately,” he says. Then, for a few moments, the only sound is the heavy, steady drip of a leak in the hallway. A while later, Shane plays the crooning Scott Walker classic “It’s Raining Today” off of his phone.