Asher White – Colbalt Room: Good Work/ Silver Saab
In September, the NYC-by-way-of-Rhode Island multi-instrumentalist, writer and visual artist Asher White will release her new LP, 8 Tips For Full Catastrophe Living.
Her first album for her new label home Joyful Noise (who will release the album on September 12th), the record is the follow up to 2024’s Home Constellation Study.
Today Asher is back to share a new single, a miniature epic entitled “Cobalt Room: Good Work / Silver Saab.”
To coincide with the track’s release Stereogum have published an Artist to Watch feature on the quickly rising White.
“Cobalt Room: Good Work / Silver Saab” is the audacious, 7-minute centerpiece of 8 Tips For Full Catastrophe Living. Here, White stretches out her songwriting to new filmic extremes. Cycling through dramatic, propulsive contrasts, she paints a fractured image of a doomed marriage haunted by distance, war, and troubled sex. She intersperses sludge metal with Brazilian Tropicália rhythms; bare guitars kick up into smooth, twinkling jazz, which then erupts into an extended krautrock coda.
“It’s the sequential sum of what I was listening to and reading at the time,” notes White on the song’s scope. “I was interested in pulling every idea to its extreme. Because it’s just me recording, I can pursue the most whimsical, outrageous aspects of the music. What would be the funniest or most cartoonish place to take this? And how can I make that rewarding still?”
Inspired by Claire Denis’ 1999 film Beau Travail, “Cobalt Room” is 8 Tips’ most theatrical, narrative-forward piece, imagining the existential and romantic frustrations of an aging military wife.
Asher says of the song:
“Another narrative piece in three parts which steals its title and first act from Claire Denis’ 1999 film Beau Travail, a movie that consists mostly of very striking, gorgeous images of recruits for the French Foreign Legion training in homoerotic silence at a campground in Djibouti. This song imagines the wife of one of these men who is left to imagine the sort of fraternal love and belonging her husband is enjoying at camp and begins to suspect it is his way of actualizing an unrealized gay lifestyle and subsequently reflects on their marriage with newfound skepticism. My version is set in Morocco where the French Foreign Legion had outposts up through the 20th century; the coda suggests the husband has either returned to France with money or perhaps settled in Morocco with a luxury car, vaguely echoing a theme of displacement and intrusion from “Why i bought the house”. Musically this is the logical result of a period last spring where every morning I was listening to Nara Leão and every night i was getting high and listening to Eyehategod and a spanish death metal band called Teitanblood.”
Tour Dates
9/17 – New York, NY @ Nightclub 101
9/23 – Montreal, QB @ P’Tit Ours
9/24 – Rochester, NY @ Psychic Garden
9/26 – Pittsburgh, PA @ Gov’t Center
9/28 – Detroit, MI @ Sanctuary
9/30 – Chicago, IL @ Hideout
10/1 – Indianapolis @ State Street Pub
10/6 – Athens, GA @ Flicker
10/7 – Knoxville, TN @ Pilot Light
10/8 – Greensboro, NC @ Flat Iron
10/9 – Richmond, VA @ Mocha Mart
10/10 – Washington, DC @ Rhizome
10/11 – Baltimore, MD @ Normals
10/12 – Philadelphia, PA @ Cambria House
10/14 – Kingston, NY @ Tubby’s
10/15 – Providence, RI @ AS220
#trasherwhite