Florida-born, Los Angeles-based Artist To Watch Deloyd Elze specializes in a deconstructed form of electronic-tinged alt-country that he refers to as "digital twang." The singer-songwriter-producer, born Jacob Henry Allen, impressed us with his recent EP Nellene and its subsequent extended version, and today he's back with another new single. The extremely pretty "Yamaha 250" weaves banjo and pedal steel, synths and samplers into a softly glowing whole. Allen says:
Not long after settling into my old apartment in Hollywood, I picked up a typewriter from a local thrift shop and fell into a daily ritual — writing before my old construction job, or writing when I returned home. Each entry became a small record of what I saw along the drive, and Hollywood, I quickly learned, is a liminal place: extremes on both ends of the spectrum.
While collecting my case studies, I'd been experimenting with a drum technique my friend Wilter developed — building stock Ableton drum racks to approximate the fractured, non-repeating logic of an Autechre style drum machine. Over the Autechre style drums, I wrote what became the guitar riff for "Yamaha 250," and later layered in live drum breaks, drawn to how the organic and mechanical rhythms collided against each other.
The lyrics began from free-associating, pulling lines from a backlog of old poems and short stories, splicing them together until the song had assembled itself almost without my noticing. The line "you set the table, and I'll say grace" arrived while I was hunting for something to anchor the song — I looked up at my own empty dining table, and it simply fell out. It means more to me than its literal reading; like the rest of the song, it's really several things folded into one, the way all these small, strange moments seem to weave together into a single story.
Listen to "Yamaha 250" below.
