Album Notes

Phantom West, the musical project from Los Angeles masterminded by Timothy Clark, has long found expression across multiple genres. From the dreamlike instrumental and electronic sounds of the 2005 album Chimaera, the noize/industrial/dance remixes of The Rain Expedition EP in 2006, the highly varied synth-pop, darkwave, and hard rock of 2007’s Aleph Null, and then the introspective, long-form ambient work on the 2009 album Aperture, Phantom West has never been constrained (for good and ill) to a single sonic template. The full live band of Phantom West consists of Timothy Clark on vocals and guitar, Daniel Hengeveld on guitar, Nemo Chen on bass, Daisy Zhang on keyboards, and Jojo Klittivit on drums. Phantom West is working on several upcoming projects, including a new electronic dance-oriented album, more long-form compositions, and an album written by the full band.

The new album for 2011 from Phantom West is Vaporware. Sometimes inflected with the expansive shoegaze aesthetics reminiscent of early Lush or later My Bloody Valentine, other times with the straight-ahead 90s rock sound of Sugar, and with other tracks that recall The Cure’s Wish album, but all with a distinctly modern production style and sound, Vaporware is a set of ten tracks over 44 minutes that will take the listener from the tragedy that befell the first Earthling in space (“The Life of Perfect Creatures”), to life in a futuristic media-saturated dystopia (“Leper Machine”), to the blooded snows of Finland in 1939 (“The Winter War”).