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ABOUT SPAER:
Spaer is the solo project of musician and visual artist Peter Spears. Like a rainbow quilt sewn of whatever scraps its creator found in the attic, Spaers’ music is eclectic by nature, not force. He’s not trying to seem clever: it is simply how his brain works to erect bridges between sonic lands which most would never think to associate. Those familiar with Psymon Spine (the experimental pop outfit Spears co-founded in 2012) may recognize his unique ability to irreverently, yet convincingly, bend genre until you stop thinking in terms of genre altogether.
While there is clear sonic overlap with Psymon Spine, Spaer definitively inhabits its own space, acting as a sort of test kitchen for Spears to explore some of his most unhinged creative ideas. Vocal harmonies reminiscent of a Smiley Smile era Brian Wilson sit with purpose atop exploding drums and warped samples of Spears’ own voice and instruments. Finger-picked acoustic guitar proliferates otherwise synth-laden and shape-shifting soundscapes for a result that feels psychedelic and broad, yet thematically and sonically cohesive. It’s not easy listening, but it’s easy to listen to and easy to get lost in.
Spaer’s newest offering Lessons & Nonsense sweats the small stuff, with a penchant for metaphor through animism and building boundless worlds in tiny physical spaces. It feels like a friend encouraging you to look - no, really look - at the intricate, meandering channels of a cool leaf he found. If you give yourself fully to the moment, you realize you hold an entire world in your hand. The EP’s opener, “The Salamander and the Snail”, was inspired by a snail he once (actually) saw riding on the back of a salamander, who was itself riding a flip-flop like a life raft. Spears felt moved watching the two tumble in circles around a waterfall at the mouth of a cave and was inspired to write this touching reflection on friendship, futility, and relational cycles. In the EP’s penultimate song, “The Woodstove,” Spears croons from the perspective of a protective and ultimately concerningly possessive woodstove. And in the EP’s closer, “These Bugs,” he lovingly pokes fun at his vegan girlfriend, forced to kill ants following a hostile takeover of their kitchen.
Across the project, Spears is able to hold all at once beauty and brutality, hope and cynicism, humor and a genuine love of life. Fans of psych rock, trip-hop, folk, indie, and even pop, will all find resonance in the expanse of sounds by Spears. And if you don’t care about genre at all, all the better.
ABOUT VHS RECORDS:
Vinegar Hill Sound Records (VHS Records) is an independent, artist-run record label based in Brooklyn, New York, founded in 2024 by producer, mixer, and engineer Reed Black. Born out of the storied Vinegar Hill Sound recording studio, a 1,200-square-foot hybrid analog-digital space housed in a 19th-century former warehouse between DUMBO and the Navy Yard, the label carries forward the studio's ethos of handcrafted, deeply personal music-making.
Black, who has spent over a decade recording major artists including Solange, Karen O, Wet, and Depeche Mode, launched VHS Records with a different ambition in mind: not scale, but intimacy. Inspired by the community spirit of classic labels like Stax Records, VHS operates as a small, deliberately curated roster where every release is made with care and intention.
Free from outside investors and commercial pressures, VHS Records draws its strength from the same source as the studio that spawned it: a belief that the best records are made by people who care deeply, working in a space designed to let them do exactly that.
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