JAYE JAYLE REVEALS SURREAL, TRIPPY NEW VIDEO

On his newest Jaye Jayle album, Prisyn— out August 7th from Sargent House— Evan Patterson takes his boldest leap into unknown territories, capturing immediate moments in his ever-shifting surroundings with the most basic tool at his disposal: the GarageBand app on an iPhone.

Having partnered with Ben Chisholm (White Horse, Revelator, Chelsea Wolfe) as collaborator and producer, the twosome created an electronic album completely unlike anything else from the fever dream blues of Jaye Jayle. Composed while on a massive eleven-week stretch of touring, Patterson used his downtime to flesh out ideas on his phone. Consequently, Prisyn’s ten tracks are composites of various snapshots of Patterson’s three-month tour, with the music taking shape on one leg of the journey and the lyrical components coming from some other moment on the road.

The expanded horizons provided by extensive touring also served as a point of contrast for Patterson’s comparatively conservative hometown of Louisville, which became the muse for his new single Don’t Blame The Rain. The track sounds like a drug-induced panic attack in a European discotheque, though the lyrics tackle Southern conservatism and Patterson’s efforts to rise above a culture he doesn’t believe in. Today, Jaye Jayle has premiered a music video for the album’s seminal track, directly by Greg Sheppard.

Watch the video here:

Of Don’t Blame The Rain, Patterson comments: “Poetically and politically, this song is about being raised in a small town in Kentucky and the struggle to keep one’s head above the suffocating right-wing model. Those who are brought up in a southern culture mentality rarely escape the oppressive grip. To see through the mask of surrounding influence is no simple task. This song is for those that had the wit to emerge themselves from the sandpits of western civilisation’s inhumane past.”

In addition to the single release, stems for the song are available to remix now on Isolate/Create— an interactive platform spearheaded by Sargent House label mates The Armed, which is a free resource providing creatives with digital assets to spark creativity and inspire digital collaboration, all while practicing responsible social distancing and helping flatten the curve during the Covid-19 crisis.  

The album title— Prisyn— is a play on the idea of a synthetic prison, and alludes to Patterson’s desire for artistic freedom and the album’s conflicted use of addictive technologies.  But in the time of the pandemic, he also views it as an example of overcoming adversity in desperate times; this is a record that could have been made under the jail-like confines of quarantine, with Patterson and Chisholm having never been in the same room at the same time. 

Patterson comments, “These songs have a totally different energy, and that’s the exciting thing about making art. Things have to progress. I don’t want to draw the same picture for the rest of my life. Maybe that keeps you from being a master at it, but being a master isn’t the key to art. It’s having that constant expression, the constant outlet, the constant change.”

Prisyn is available for pre-order here.