I’m sitting in Senate House library in central London during a thunderstorm thinking about Salem.  Salem is a band from somewhere in the States that I don’t think is New York, and while the view out of the filthy window pane on the 8th floor is what got me thinking about them, the gray, wet London cityscape is not an entirely appropriate way to introduce their sound.

If Burial’s extraordinary self-titled album on Hyperdub sounds like it’s set in an underwater South London in the near future, Salem’s is set somewhere near the banks of the Great Lakes during a flood, at night, in the present or even the recent past, during an economic depression, in a frightening, cold, and desolate world.

For some reason their sound is suburban rather than urban, from a place where you can reach the woods from your backyard and most roads are desolate.  Their music is dysphoric, in the particular sense used by Dominic Fox.

The naked woman undulating on the hood of a car in mist – from their outstanding video for “Dirt” – is simultaneously a properly phantasmic demon and a world-weary stripper from Detroit slightly hesitant about performing in a garage and having her routine caught on camera.  There is a wonderful shot of dangling breasts and another of her coccyx .

Regretfully, I have seen pictures of the band members and their cheekbones in NME or The Fader or where ever.

The first time I heard Salem was on Sinden‘s Fabric mixtape, “Redlights” being the proverbial go-out-into-the-dawn track that ends the party.   A friend screened the video for “Dirt” via a projector at a party and stopped the party (by the way, the video is supposed to be silent for the first minute or so).

I am unabashadedly a fan in the sense discussed by K-Punk and Graham Harman: I have a deep libidinal investment to their slowly expanding oeuvre.

Salem – Dirt released by Acéphale.