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STEPHEN STEINBRINK

Stephen Steinbrink

Disappearing Coin

    For Fans Of: Elliott Smith, Fleet Foxes, Grizzly Bear, Sufjan Stevens.

    In 2019, Stephen Steinbrink discovered a short YouTube video of a street magician who approaches a highschooler walking home in Barstow, California. “Here, let me show you my idea,” he says, as he places a quarter on the kid’s hand. The magician performs some relaxed flourishes, and the coin vanishes. In silence, the kid stares at his hand at the nothing where there once, indisputably, was something, until his wonder finds a single word: “Cool.” The title of Disappearing Coin, the new album from Oakland songwriter Stephen Steinbrink, comes from this short clip. “When I look at it now,” he says, “I relate to the kid, who’s obviously uneasy in his body, and going through the experience of being a teenager in the early 2000s growing up in a bleak desert town like I did. I also relate to the coin, an inanimate disc of possibility. And I relate to the magician, an absurd facilitator of sending what is tactile and concrete into the wispy conceptual realm.” “I’ve watched it probably a hundred times,” he says. “It cracked me up but also blew my mind open the feeling of wonder I experienced watching this video became a guide as I navigated new ways of staying in the realm of what’s both real and magical.”

    Following the 2018 release of Utopia Teased, Steinbrink completed an apprenticeship in the nearly-lost art of Stained Glass, becoming a glazier at a studio that over three years, fully restored the enormous 90-year-old windows in San Francisco’s Grace Cathedral. He committed to his Buddhist study, beginning lay monastic training before the process was thwarted by the pandemic. He dove deeper into music production for other artists, engineering two albums by Boy Scouts released on Anti- Records in 2018 and 2021. Steinbrink delighted in the way these pursuits pulled at the thread of ego’s tapestry and decentralized him from his craft, allow ing him to embody a new role as a creative caretaker engaging in practices that felt communal and restorative.

    “As I slowly began writing for myself again, I tried to imbue my new songs with this sense of playfulness and wonder I felt while exploring these other interests.” He says. Feeling unlocked from the pressures of perfection that he often felt in his earlier work, creating Disappearing Coin felt buoyant and healing. “The album feels like an integration of all of my past musical selves zeroing in on the present,” Steinbrink explains, “I felt free to explore new ways of writing, through different perspectives, experimenting with fictional songwriting, visual archetypal language, and total collaboration.” This “total collaboration” was a joyous new venture after years of solo performing and recording.

    The album can be seen as a 42 minute session of show and tell, the manifestation of Steinbrink repeating the mantra of “Here, let me show you my idea” to himself over and over. Disappearing Coin is at once a welcome return for the veteran Steinbrink and the debut of a totally new artist, one who has found a new path to himself with new goals of openness, curiosity, and self-acceptance.

    “Recalls the magic pop purity of Arthur Russell...its minimalism manages to feel enlightened and transformative.” PITCHFORK.

    “Melodic and self-assured. Steinbrink delivers his knotted lyricism with a smooth lilt. STEREOGUM.

    TRACK LISTING

    01 Opalescent Ribbon
    02 If There's Love In Your Heart
    03 Cruiser
    04 Nowhere Real
    05 Pony
    06 Glitch Eternity
    07 Step's Disappearing Coin
    08 Cruiser (Reprise)
    09 Cool And Collected
    10 Comedy
    11 Who Cares
    12 Poured Back In The Stream
    13 Addicted To A Dream
    14 Nowhere Real (Reprise)

    Stephen Steinbrink

    Utopia Teased

      Stunned with grief in the months following the Ghost Ship fire, Oakland-based Stephen Steinbrink ate LSD daily, bought a synthesizer, and locked himself in his shipping container studio, refusing to sleep for days as he wrote and recorded what would become Utopia Teased, as a means of working through his overwhelming feelings of cynicism and loss.

      Recorded in between stints touring as a member of Dear Nora, and then as a touring member of Girlpool, Utopia Teased is Stephen Steinbrink's followup to his critically acclaimed 2016 album Anagrams. Unlike the pristine production of Anagrams, on Utopia Teased Steinbrink embraces the rough edges, as he shifts his focus from the craft of production to the art of processing and capturing his experiences with honesty. He explains, “I was driving the preamps a little too hard, mixing down to tape, bouncing back to the computer, and repeating the process over and over again. I wanted it to reflect how fried my brain felt at the time, totally pulverized. The songs just poured out of me, it hardly felt like work to make them up. It was like turing on a spigot. I don’t write often, maybe once or twice a year, but when I do, a lot comes out..”

      “Empty Vessel” and “Maximum Sunlight” both sung from perspective of residents of Tonopah, Nevada, were written to accompany a book about the town, by Steinbrink's friend Meagan Day. The sparse imagery on “Empty Vessel,” ostensibly about a semi-transient lock-picking truck driver, feels at least semi-autobiographical as Steinbrink sings “You're 31, you don't believe in anything…If you don't stop moving you'll never get hurt.” His evocative lyrics continue to intrigue on “Maximum Sunlight” as he sings “Sleeping through the night in the drained pool / I said I love you to a fool” from the perspective of a 30-year-old alcoholic ATV enthusiast.

      Much of his outlook on life is captured on the elegiac waltz “Zappa Dream,” (originally written and recorded by his friend Rosie Steffy) on which he sings, “Dreams are so fucked up / Even the really good ones…Would it be such a bad thing / To be finished with living?...Everyone preserves a myth / Guards it like a bone / You see it in your lover's eyes / But never in your own…There is a magic on this earth / In cats and clouds and cars / For everything that you call "real" / Was once the dust of stars / Yeah you have been a river rock / And a drop of rain / And with any bit of luck / You'll be those things again / Are you in love with your life or a dream / Or just overwhelmed/ Wondering what this could possibly mean?” At the close of the, too-little-too-late acoustic narrative “Mom”, guest vocalist Melina Duterte of Jay Som joins him in conjuring a memory of listening to extraterrestrial radio, drifting asleep in a suburban Phoenix Wal-Mart parking lot. The album’s heartbreaking closer “I’m Never Changing Who You Are” continues Steinbrink’s recollection of his adolescence, asking an unnamed family member “Will you try to love more than you did?” while soberly accepting his reality.

      In an interview with North of the Internet, Steinbrink recalled a video he came across on his phone, which was taken the day after the fire, “It sent me spiraling and thinking, it’s almost been a year. Nothing really felt actual those weeks, and I could only only react to the future at a remove because the horror of everything was inescapably tying me to the present. The idea of doing laundry or driving across the bridge to San Francisco to work was too abstract, so I just didn’t do it. I hardly did anything. Two days after the fire I woke up, walked to P.’s porch and sat there for hours alone and cried without a jacket on until the sun started going down. Geese were flying across power lines at dusk and I took a video of them on my phone. I imagined one of the birds was my friend.” In the same interview, he goes on to share some insight provided by a friend he reached out to when trying to finalize the album: “Finishing the thing puts a limit around something that comes from an infinite well; this is uncomfortable.” True.


      TRACK LISTING

      1. Bad Love 
      2. I Wanna Be Free 
      3. A Part Of Me Is A Part Of You 
      4. Empty Vessel 
      5. Maximum Sunlight
      6. Zappa Dream
      7. Coming Down
      8. Mom
      9. In Another Kind Of Dream
      10. Become Sphere
      11. You Could Always Leave 
      12. I'm Never Changing Who You Are

      After ten years of touring and secluded home recording, Stephen Steinbrink has cataloged several albums worth of gorgeous melody and quotidian dread in his stark, minimal pop. Yet the songs on his latest, Anagrams, beautiful yet unflinching portraits of addiction and mental illness are captured in his most meticulous and high-fidelity production to date. While one might expect the record to be a final destination, a tidy hi-res apex of all his journeying, the album's particularly varied styles and sincere lyrical uncertainty portray a search that still continues.

      "Lately writing songs almost makes me feel like I'm losing it, like I keep digging up and re-burying the same old bone. I tried to continue unpacking these forgotten images and memories, except this time without placing any subjective meaning on them, or any expectation of personal growth to occur after. Maybe it's silly to expect the process of making art to be a clarifying act."

      Stephen's artistic trajectory can be considered nomadic in the obvious sense: when not incessantly touring Europe and the U.S. in the last two years, he spent his stationary moments writing in California, Arizona and Washington. Most of his previous recordings were the product of self-engineered experiments, culminating in 2014's Arranged Waves, an unabashedly digital tableau of subdued, heartbreaking pop. Now, Anagrams finds him chasing melodies in the polished largesse of a proper studio.

      Anagrams was intensely recorded over 2 years at UNKNOWN, a retrofitted analogue studio in a lofty, de-sanctified church in the secluded island town of Anacortes, Washington. Assisted by engineer Nicholas Wilbur and featuring performances by members of Mt. Eerie, LAKE, and Hungry Cloud Darkening, Steinbrink's songs gracefully inhabit the vastness of the space in which they were recorded, effortlessly gliding between glacial grunge lurches, lush country movements, and succinct power pop.

      The most ambitious of Stephen's pop songcraft, Anagrams is ultimately an unpacking of identity. "I don't care about continuing in a tradition of songwriters, and I rarely intentionally self-identify as one. I always wonder if my most recent song is the last one I'll ever write. I try to be more concerned with being open, to imagine myself as a rock or a wrapper or nothing at all. Whenever I can get close to that state of mind the songs come easy, but it seems arbitrary, almost like they would've existed with or without me. I think it's a noble pursuit, to try to be nothing." An effort, ongoing.


      TRACK LISTING

      1. Absent Mind
      2. Building Machines
      3. Psychic Daydream
      4. Impossible Hand
      5. What Identiy?
      6. Canopy
      7. I'm Turning Inside Out
      8. Dissociative Blues
      9. Anagrams
      10. Black Hole / We Don't Say Anything
      11. Shine A Light On Him
      12. Next New Sun

      Stephen Steinbrink

      Arranged Waves

        There’s much to be said for solitude. It gives you time to step back and reflect. Self-taught songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, and home recordist Stephen Steinbrink has had plenty of time to do that. Having spent the last 13 of his 25 years on this planet travelling solo in Greyhounds, Toyota minivans, and European trains, his wanderlust travels as seen through his Lennon frames have shaped stunning breakthrough album Arranged Waves.

        Escapism can come in many forms. For Steinbrink whether travelling around the world singing to anyone who will listen or simply sat in a road-side diner writing his next set of songs Arranged Waves has provided that much-needed distraction. “Song writing is cheap therapy, and I process much through my music,” he reveals. “I didn't know it at the time; I was just trying to write about how I felt in a way that was real and honest to my melancholy. The album sounds soft and light at times sure, but when you're cold and wet, you don't wrap a freezing towel around your head, right?”

        Screwing with expectations, Arranged Waves goes beyond what you might think. Whilst getting inside its chords by finger-picking counter melodies, Steinbrink’s distinctive falsetto may recall a youthful Neil Young, a one-man Simon & Garfunkel or Nick Drake at his most poignant. Yet for each beautifully understated lament, there are moments where down-shifted synths gleam through 8-bit wobble (‘A Simple Armature of Your Ideal World’) and foggy 80s pop is filtered through gauzy Ariel Pink textures (‘It’s So Pretty What You Did For Me ’) like broken transmissions from a waterlogged radio. “Most folk-revivalist music now discusses topics that are more relevant to past generations,” he says shirking off inevitably lazy ‘folk’ or ‘singer-songwriter’ tags. “I’d hate to be lumped in withthat. I'd much rather hear a folk song about how someone is frustrated at their iPad, because although the subject is banal, the relevancy isn't. That is real folk music.”

        If it’s not for the album’s field recordings - the bells ringing in ‘Tangerine’ were recorded before a show in Graz, Austria whilst its low frequency hum is the manipulated recording of a bus Steinbrink was riding between Chicago and Ann Arbour - it’s his lyrics that marks Steinbrink out as a true punk troubadour trying to make sense of the world. Beyond apparent stream of consciousness Arranged Waves is an album about lost images with each song an attempt to describe moments of banality without manipulation of their inherent romance. ‘Sand Mandalas’ is about the reconciliation of meaninglessness: “It feels impossible to think the thought / that I’m doomed to make my meaning / in the arbitrary ether”, some songs are about being a child and others about the ability to change our consciousness through sheer effort.

        Now residing amongst the green spaces of Olympia, Washington, the record took shape in a small 12'x20' structure behind his new home. Enlisting friends Andrew Dorsett, Eli Moore and Ashley Eriksson (LAKE), guitarist Tom Filardo (Filardo / Bouquet) and cellist Jen Grady (You Are Plural) they set up in his home studio to record the album’s twelve songs, inspired by multi-media artist James Roemer, repressed memories of watching TV, the early 70s work of John Cale and Can, and the underground community of songwriters that live on the western coast of the USA.

        A true passenger of life, Stephen Steinbrink is more cultural observer than 21st century busker with his intelligently cool left-of-centre approach to a sincere pop melody. If you ever come across him be sure to take your chance to say ‘hi’ “I like people, people are comfort, but still, there's something nice about going out into the country and being completely autonomous and free,” he admits.

        “He can do quiet intensity- made possible by his voice, abstract (yet heartfelt) lyrics, innovative arrangements, and top-notch performance- delivered with complete and authentic sincerity. Arranged Waves is a great introduction to the music of Stephen Steinbrink- and it is quickly becoming one of my favourite albums of the year. “ 8.5/10 – Louder Than War.


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