Exclusive Track Premiere: ‘Girls on T.V.,’ Tashaki Miyaki
PHOTO COURTESY OF MARC GABOR.
“We are living in an Andy Warhol meets Orwellian vision of the future and I find it terrifying,” says Paige Stark, half of the Los Angeles-based duo Tashaki Miyaki. “It’s all about ‘likes’ and numbers and now our country is being run by a monster who was created by this very machine.” Stark isn’t alone in this fear. Anxiety about contemporary culture—reality television, hours spent glued to devices, confidence hinging on social media affirmation and annihilation—abounds. But Stark channelled feeling disconcerted into the music she creates with bandmate Luke Paquin; their new song, “Girls on T.V.,” is written from the perspective of a “media brainwashed girl” and premieres exclusively below.
Calmly critical of the fame machine, Stark begins, “I don’t want anything / Just the world to love me.” Her voice isn’t quite longing, though—its hypnotic in its consistency, as though programmed, suggesting the futility of and hurt in pursuing everyone’s love. According to Stark, this track is one of a collection of songs that “showed up” organically while writing.
We’re pleased to announce that many of those songs will be released come April 7 on the duo’s debut LP, The Dream (Metropolis). One can expect a “sonic snapshot” of sorts—tracks that are both reflections on the past and of the moment: “I was writing about various things going on in my life personally and in the world around me, varying from existential crisis to cultural observations to personal heartbreak,” Stark says. “I was thinking a lot about how we create our realities by our thoughts, words, and actions, in that order.”
THE DREAM (METROPOLIS) WILL BE RELEASED APRIL 7, 2017. TASHAKI MIYAKI’S MONDAY NIGHT RESIDENCY AT THE ECHO IN LOS ANGELES BEGINS MARCH 6, 2017. FOR MORE ON THE BAND, VISIT THEIR FACEBOOK.