Gleefully agitated like sugar-high teenagers, Single Frame makes dark, twisted music with a healthy Devo-inspired conceptual bent. The Yeah Yeah Yeahs's Nick Zinner gives "People Are Germs" the remix treatment, adding distorted beats and layers of sinister organ to the band's eccentric noise rock.
Inspired by the darker reaches of nickel theater sideshows, Body/End/Basement, the newest full-length album from Single Frame, serves as a case study in mental instability, verminophobia, and social dysfunction.
Produced by John Congelton (the pAper chAse, Explosions in the Sky, 90 Day Men), Frenchie Smith (Young Heart Attack, Sixteen Deluxe), j-mprint, Clay Youngkin, and Single Frame and mastered at Silver Sonya in DC's Inner Ear Studios (Lungfish, Holy Ghost, Aloha), the follow up to 2003's Wetheads Come Running portrays a maturation of sound and expands on the concepts of succinctness, diversity, and interlude. Body/End/Basement explores amalgamations of gritty analog and lucid digital, found sounds and volatile rhythms, rational grand piano and deranged fuzz guitar, resonant synthesizer and chaotic chant.
Single Frame focused on maintaining an experimental approach to the overall recording process. While collaborating with producers of various musical backgrounds, Single Frame toyed with underwater vocals, paint cans, air horns, broken guitars, pocket change, wrapping paper tubes, car keys, washing machines, and secondhand reel-to-reel tapes. Tracks were recorded in 4 studios, a kitchen, a bathroom, and a work shed. In addition to recording on 2 1/2 tape and digital software, Single Frame digitized several four-track experiments, layering new tracks over the top.
The release includes a DVD compiled by the Super! Alright! media collective with 9 videos by various directors highlighted by Grammy and MTV Award winner Paul Beck.
Vocalist/Drummer Adreon Henry works full-time as a visual artist in Austin, Texas and designs artwork for all Single Frame productions. The cover art for Body/End/Basement spawns from the 2002 work, "in dark you will see light", on silk-screened vinyl. In addition to screen-printing on vinyl, Adreon's media includes photography, paint, furniture, light fixtures, and film.
Single Frame formed in or around Austin in the year 2000 under the moniker Single Frame Ashtray. They released an 8-song EP, Burn Radio Airtest, through Already Gone Records in 2003, Hybrid Magazine called it "a terrifying technological masterpiece" by "what may become one of the more important bands of the day." Ashtray was then dropped from the name to make it easier to advertise, to comply with a smoking ban, and to make nails scratch heads. In 2004, Volcom Entertainment re-released an enhanced version of Single Frame's first full length Wetheads Come Running with 3 music videos including the much lauded Comm. Jet video by Paul Jones that aired on MTVU, MTV Latin America, and Musique Plus as well as numerous online media outlets. Wetheads Come Running also received extensive critical acclaim; "...evocative and progressive." - Tiny Mix Tapes, and "...a masterpiece with a heart, a face, and something to say." - Decoy Music
"Momentous - it's imperative that this band's music be brought to anyone and everyone that has an ear for it"- Andrew Bryant, Pitchfork.