Draped in ominous atmospheres and rumbling echoes, the work of multi-talented musician Michael Vallera is one of subtle detailing and slow-drip obsessiveness. We caught up with Mike to talk his new full-length on Denovali, living in Chicago and his approach to music and photography.
ArtistMichael Vallera
Results5Michael Vallera is a musician and photographer who lives and works in Chicago. Prolific as both a solo artist and collaborator, he has released albums under his own name and as COIN (Opal Tapes), with percussionist Steven Hess as Cleared (Immune Recordings), and with Joseph Clayton Mills as Maar (Umor Rex, Entr’acte). He sings and plays guitar in the experimental rock group Luggage (Don Giovanni Records). An MFA graduate of School of the Art Institute of Chicago, his work has been exhibited in Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, and elsewhere.
First Listen: Hear a first extract from Michael Vallera’s forthcoming record, ‘All Perfect Days’
Wrapping your ears around Michael Vallera‘s forlorn melodies and smouldering guitar riffs often feels like being drawn into all-devouring emotional quicksands. By turns conjuring up flickering
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In Perspective: Michael Vallera
His most recent piece, the dazzling and thoughtful ‘Vivid Flu’, mirrors the complexity of today’s multi-vectorial communication systems and endless interfacing that so often come out on existential vacuums and deep identity crisis. Firmly anchored in this era of uncertainty, and looking at this exacting reality through its own magnifying glass, Vallera’s work wholly deserved a new scan.
Music Video: Michael Vallera – Pollen Blot
To accompany the release of the album ‘Vivid Flu’, Denovali and Vallera have had a video done for ‘Pollen Blot’, which we’re no short of glad to premiere today. Setting the dissonant synths and machinic hiss of the track into a hazy tableau of hallucinated desert visions flickering like mirages interlaced with retinal images frozen in a dazzling haze. A multisensory trip.
Premiere: Michael Vallera – Vivid Flu
Of all the artists to have graced Opal Tapes’ multifarious back catalogue, Michael Vallera is certainly one of the lesser-known and very unjustly so. Also known as COIN,
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