Sand Circles: “Motor City”

One hundred years from now a rebooted robot Ridley Scott will be desperate to find the perfect soundtrack for a film he’s directing set in early twenty-first century Sweden… something kinda like Blade Runner, but not at all like The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. A time of all types of uncertainty, he will try out acoustic based music, but find it incompatible with his story. He’ll try every form of antique technology, before finding, buried deep in the ruins of an anonymous Swedish secret society, a dusty cassette labeled Sand Circles, Motor City. Scott will find a boombox, functioning only by a miracle, and fall madly in love with the music he’s hearing. Elaborate set up aside, Sand Circles (Swede Martin Hertrich) makes near perfect sci-fi sounds. The hazy synths and tired beat machines paint in reverb and carve out nooks with just the right amount of space between them to make for a compelling trip through his version of “motor city.” What is that vision? It’s noir for sure. As a listener we’re taken into an urban landscape that is full of struggle, but there’s a hopeful, if ambivalent, glimpse of happier days on the horizon.

Motor City is still available from Not Not Fun

Written by Jeff Daily