Black Wing

Black Wing

No Moon

Flenser

Dan Barrett—the man behind Have A Nice Life, Giles Corey, and Enemies List Home Recordings—has unveiled his sophomore album as the electronic project Black Wing on The Flenser. No Moon is a gorgeous chillwave / post-punk record with nine bleak yet blissful songs and is a fitting close out to the year 2020. Written over the course of the last few years, with about half of the songs penned over the last six months (mostly due to pandemic “free time”), No Moon is a heart-wrenchingly honest outpour of emotion. Throughout the writing process, Barrett was having recurring dreams and felt a strange sense of timelessness—that, combined with quarantine is what he simply describes as “a weird experience.” Barrett explains, “Quarantine was profoundly isolating. With writing this record, more than anything I just wanted to prove to myself that I could make something out of it. That ended up being a lot of songs about feeling isolated, a lot of ‘trapped in my own head’ moments. I think that was a lot of people’s experience as well.” Barrett formed Black Wing in the mid-2010s as an opposite to his project Giles Corey; where Giles started as “only acoustic instruments allowed,” Black Wing started with only digital instruments. In 2015, Black Wing released its first proper full length, …Is Doomed, to great critical acclaim. Much like that album, No Moon bubbles with electronica and indie-pop with earworm melodies and affecting lyrics. But No Moon is a transitional change from Black Wing’s debut;...

Black Wing

...is Doomed

Flenser

Dan Barrett, the man behind Connecticut-based Have a Nice Life, Giles Corey, Enemies List and countless other endeavors, has announced the first proper full-length from his digital-only solo project, Black Wing. Titled Is Doomed, this seven-song album is available courtesy of The Flenser label.  The majority of the tracks on Is Doomed are brand new, although the release boasts a mastered version of the widely circulated song “My Body Betrayed Me,” which has been available on Bandcamp and made waves immediately upon upload. The Chicago Reader described the track as combining “a stark, mechanized post-punk beat, gentle shoegaze guitar hum, feathery ascending synths and Barrett’s cool, multi-tracked vocals into an uplifting, celestial tune that belies its heart-wrenching and bleak lyrics; even as he sings about dying Barrett manages to sound just a little bit blissful.” Like all of Barrett’s projects, Black Wing was self-recorded at home, but this process was a bit different for him. At the time, Barrett was having some health problems—the first serious health issues he’d ever had—and was “surrounded by all sorts of machines, lots of beeps and boops and what have you. I had a heart monitor strapped to my chest for a month. I was dripping a lot of blood all over the place. It was all very undramatic and fleshly and strange. I didn’t know what to make of any of it. Meanwhile, it was a beautiful, hot summer, sun everywhere. So I decided to just go ahead and make a depressive...