Fringes of Sound
Holmes’ voice seems to carry much of the album and much of the instruments are sparse throughout. However sparse, the underlying compositions seem to borrow so widely from other musical styles that it is almost impossible to accurately nail each influence down.
Favorite track: Hold Me Ghost.
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Record/Vinyl + Digital Album
LIMITED EDITION 12'' CLEAR VINYL LP.
Full color Jackets, come with digital download and double sided lyrics insert
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Record/Vinyl + Digital Album
SPECIAL EDITION (AUTOGRAPHED) LP - CLEAR VINYL + DIGITAL 7''
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edition of 33
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Record/Vinyl + Digital Album
MUSIC IS A GIFT BUNDLE - ONE COPY FOR YOU AND ONE COPY SHIPPED TO A FRIEND
TWO COPIES OF THE BEDROOM WITCH "A PLACE OF HURT" LP ON BLACK VINYL
In the order notes, please include the email, shipping address, and full name of the person you would like to ship the second copy to. Please include up to three sentences you would like us to handwrite into a note for your gift to them in the notes section along with the shipping info. Thank you for gifting the greatest gift ever, music. We will also include a second digital download with the second record of the bundle. You will also get 10% off the order and free shipping on the second item
Includes unlimited streaming of Nightmare In Paradise
via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.
SPECIAL EDITION BUNDLE Includes 12'' LP On Clear Vinyl, Digital 7'' + Limited Edition "Faces" T-Shirt
Record/Vinyl + Digital Album
SPECIAL EDITION BUNDLE Includes 12'' LP On Clear Vinyl, Digital 7'' + Limited Edition 'FACES" T-Shirt - Designed by the Artist
Includes unlimited streaming of Nightmare In Paradise
via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.
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"Nightmare in Paredise" Two Color Hand-Embelleshed T-Shirt
T-Shirt/Apparel + Digital Album
"Nightmare in Paredise" Two Color Hand-Embelleshed T-Shirt
*****A Note About This Design***
Each print of this design has a slightly varied black line going through the face and the blue line is placed slightly differently, making no two shirts exactly unique.
Includes unlimited streaming of Nightmare In Paradise
via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.
“Nightmare In Paradise” by Tyler Holmes was written in the wake of a violent trauma that Holmes and tour mates experienced on their last night in Puerto Rico at the end of an otherwise blissful tour. Holmes stayed behind with longtime collaborator and friend San Cha to care for their injured bandmate, taking shifts sleeping on a hospital floor and staying with friends in downtown San Juan. Upon returning stateside, Holmes experienced intense PTSD, bouts of agoraphobia, and extreme ongoing stomach pain. The symptoms drove them to composition as a survival tool and means to process extreme dark thoughts, anxieties and emotions. Initially the project began as acoustic guitar demos sounding like Hole’s MTV Unplugged performance remixed by Tricky, the songs eventually morphed into the electro-acoustic aquarium that the album contains now.
Despite the album’s violent and chaotic conceptual underpinnings, “Nightmare In Paradise” is the culmination of many years of toil, struggle, scrapping and re-editing, crying and singing, ultimately rebirthing the most complex and nuanced musical offering yet from Bay Area artist Tyler Holmes. “Nightmare In Paradise” is Holmes’ most refined and deliberate distillation of concept and composition working in a complicated and refined harmony. Through even more delicate and nuanced vocal presentation across the twelve songs, beds of layered acoustic guitar, minimal electronics, cello and woodwinds, Holmes has refined their hybridization of Electronic / Folk / R&B and Modern Black Classical music to a feverish crescendo on “Nightmare In Paradise”.
“I’ve been calling this my ‘adult-contemporary’ album because it is leagues softer than anything I’ve ever released, especially as a collection. This work was created as a document of my personal recovery from a very violent traumatic event and maps my experience with healing, PTSD, and illness. If the record is soft, or soothing, it is so because I needed to tell the story that way to make it palatable to process for myself. I needed to channel brutality through a healing lens to be able to recount the experience.”
The album features 12 players across its 12 tracks and a duet co-produced by LA’s GESS. Holmes’ uncanny ability to constantly reinvent and reimagine their own compositions through the addition of live players, remixes, in both expanded and minimal forms shines through on several tracks on the album, highlighted through lush strings and wind sections, such as on the lead track “Confuse Me”.
These moments aren’t beautiful accidents however, rather delicately wrapped sonic gifts in musical form. Pulling from genres as disparate as Harsh Noise and Dop-Wop, Holmes breathes life into their own uniquely personal sonic and conceptual world.
Holmes states “I wanted to create a white space. A clean slate; where emotions (no matter how painful) could present themselves fluidly and be wiped clean. To process the traumas and tribulations one by one, each feeling a colorful gesture on blank canvas. Each wound here for a moment and then passing off into the void to make way for the next.”
The album’s lead single and visual “Confuse Me,” a breakup song written as a reflection in the aftermath of a long tumultuous romance. Minimal synths, electronics and horns lay delicately below Holmes’ breathy, layered vocals. On “Confuse Me” Holmes channels a reflecting pool of emotion, building intricate architectural structures within a single feeling or experience, providing the listener with an intimate window into the destruction and need for rebuilding which informed the album. Through precision and stark, pop minimalism- the listener is transported into a space where Holmes is oftentimes present in the space, whispering out of the speakers. Other times, the lyrics reflect inwardly on Holmes own subjective orientation to the story (talking to themself,) but never closing the listener off completely. Holmes has allowed us into their vivid universe as an observer, friend and perhaps even on occasion, the subject. Like a jellyfish following an unknown torrent, we float through the rich sonic landscape of “Nightmare In Paradise '' a nd all of it’s vivid conceptual dichotomies. Rich in feeling, form, and execution, “Nightmare in Paradise'' w ill appease fans from Bjork, FKA Twigs, Xiu Xiu, and Florist, while simultaneously carrying them to spaces untouched by these names adorned to so many of us.
Nightmare In Paradise:
01 Heart Token
02 Confuse Me
03 Concrete Balloon
04 The Girl You Knew
05 To Accept
06 Song
07 Moss
08 Eden
09 Hold Me Ghost
10 Nightmare In Paradise 11 Guts
12 Canvas
Biography:
TYLER HOLMES (They/Them) is a singer-songwriter, visual and performance artist who uses music as therapeutic device. Coming from a turbulent and traumatic ‘cult-like’ early life, Holmes has spent a lifetime crafting their own Black, Queer narrative by pushing the limits of their imagination. In a constant state of reinvention they make a mixtape of every moment, from song to song the audience is getting a wholly different animal. Holmes has a chameleonic singing style that ranges from Folk inflected whispers, to morose Goth wails, to Gospel bellows. Envisioning themself as the imaginary child of Björk and Tricky, Tyler Holmes is on an isthmus between Trip Hop and Experimental Pop. They use a surrealist lens on a wide variety of genres, often blending diaristic narratives with dark, dream-like whimsy. Autobiographical and absurd, their writing is alluring and uncomfortable. Both brutal and beautiful, bringing the audience into a shared space of healing and catharsis. They perform with a constantly changing electro-acoustic arrangement, always finding new ways to showcase an intimate horror. Most recently Holmes' released their music video "Nothing" via Paper Magazine. In 2019/20 they released a series of EP’s and Spring 2021 marks the release of their highly anticipated new LP “Nightmare In Paradise” on Ratskin Records.
Ratskin Records is a collective record label and archival imprint championing decolonial experimental music centered in the
Bay Area and beyond . We collaborate with and are in community with LGBTQ+, Black, Native, POC, and disabled artists who create work that is sonically and politically pushing boundaries toward liberation....more
For Fans Of: Arpeggiators, Synthesizers, Anyietx, Chase Scenes, Entroty, Buildings Collapsing, Diamanda Galas “Litinies Of Satan”, Wolf Eyes, Zombi, Lucio Fulci,Tetsuo The Iron Man et al. Ratskin Records
Experimental electronic soundscapes steeped in dystopian themes; environmental and societal anxieties vented through industrial and techno. Bandcamp New & Notable Feb 15, 2024
