Sage Caswell – Evil Twin

Shape-shifting left coast producer Sage Caswell likens his latest full-length to a surrealist architectural space: I walk up to a building and Evil Twin is playing. A copy of me is at the door and I let myself in. Inside the house is inside my head; each room is a different song and emotion. A distinct dream sequence logic threads together these nine nuanced tracks, which swerve from vaporous melancholy to ecstatic motion to nocturnal wanderlust, alternately lucid and opaque. 2018's relocation from his beloved home base of Los Angeles to Madison, Wisconsin certainly played a role, as pulling up roots inevitably does: I love L.A. more than I can properly articulate, but I saw an opportunity to leave so I took it. The experience prompted an exploratory set of recordings inspired by notions of separation, vulnerability, and how it feels to identify the things in your life that don't feel like you. Evil Twin captures Caswell at his most fluid and dualistic, mapping a multi-hued maze of twisted rhythms and refracted textures, fluctuating between beatific expanse and amniotic bangers. Previous releases for Spring Theory and Far Away showcased Caswell's capacity for innerspace club voyaging but here his vision skews even more vividly elusive, immersive and immaterial, lost and found. The record's contradictions were deliberate and, most importantly, therapeutic: Evil Twin was intended to be as much a visual idea as a soundtrack to feeling out of control. I didn't really want to talk about it, so I made this album.