Sandy Denizen is a resident of nowhere in particular.
As a perpetually bored world traveler, Sandy drifts about aboard an active cargo ship, the USS Holiday. A former “Artist in Residence'' on the rusty boat, Sandy’s planned tenure onboard elapsed and extended into a few extra days, then a month, then a few months, then a year. These days, Sandy is something of an official stowaway; the crew provides a bunk, food, and a small closet to write and record music. Sandy occasionally enlists members of the crew in a rotating band of “studio musicians.” They usually aren’t paid for their efforts--but then again, neither is Sandy.
Reinforced Concrete was written in a period of roughly two months, amidst a shipping expedition from New York to Rio de Janeiro. In transit, Denizen spent the majority of the time with a collection of books on Brazilian culture and history, finding a deep appreciation for Tropicalia and the architecture of Oscar Niemeyer. The images on the album’s cover are reimaginings of the silhouettes of Niemeyer’s structures. The songs themselves owe a debt to the structures and arrangements found on classic records like Os Mutantes, Construcao, and Acabou Chorare. Like many of Sandy’s favorite lo-fi records, the tracks on Reinforced Concrete wear their faults on their sleeves, proudly displaying the crackle and hiss of the budget equipment used in their creation, recalling 90s classics by The Magnetic Fields, Yo La Tengo, and Guided By Voices.
As the tight confines of the ship make any sort of spontaneity difficult, Sandy’s life falls into deeply repetitive patterns and habits. Reinforced Concrete attempts to take these periods of intense monotony and reinfuse them with their lost meaning. These cyclical repetitions find their way into both the lyrics and sonic palette used in recording, basing many tracks around the unchanging pulse of a Casio keyboard beat, a synthesizer arpeggio, or an archaic drum machine called the Maestro Rhythm King. With its explorations of boredom, daily routines, and repetition, Reinforced Concrete makes for an accidentally-apt soundtrack for the current antisocial era.
Alongside music, Sandy Denizen enjoys sci-fi/fantasy, world-building, daydreaming, flat-out making things up, and other flights of fancy. Both Sandy and the crew of the USS Holiday hope you enjoy their first official release, and that it offers some kind of glimpse into the highs and lows of their shared time at sea.
