urika’s bedroom is intentionally left muddied in presentation. That’s both in sound and in image. Tchad Cousins, the Los Angeles based artist behind the project, has intentionally tried to obscure how he is perceived. Anything that comes up when you search “urika’s bedroom” online that isn’t a direct link to his music is shrouded in some level of crafted intrigue. The images around the project in their hazy and degraded digital presentation have a lot to take in, but little to be answered.
Much of the same was the case when we at KRUI reached out to Cousins ahead of the urika’s bedroom performance at Gabe’s in Iowa City on February 25th in partnership with SCOPE. He was deliberately aloof and answered questions in a short, vague manner. With this all we have for a mission statement from him is, “I was inspired by love, crime, and Modest Mouse.”
In the absence of information though, there can be ideas for an explanation. It could be a matter of wanting to keep a low profile in the digital age where seemingly any information about you can leak out into the world, even if a lot of that information has already seeped through. This is perhaps why when asked about other artistic projects he was working on outside of urika’s bedroom, he only said, “Personal things just for me.”
It could also just be another aspect of the art itself. In his music videos for songs on his album Big Smile, Black Mire are several cryptic like images, clipped and spliced together so they’re flashing in even more obscurity. They all are derived from early 2000s inspired visuals with sharply colored backdrops filmed through older grainy digital cameras. The images are often of a suburban type of decay between fields of concrete and tall brown grasses. The same is true with the marketing, using images behind raster lines paired with washed out graphics. About the visuals, Cousins said, “I don’t know if pairs at all. I guess the graphics are washed out because I am. It’s like a Millennial brain rot thing.”
These degraded digital images do combine with the music to bolster this meticulously crafted persona and presentation. On Big Smile, Black Mire the songs are gritty as the textures are battered in the recording. It’s an effect that Cousins strives for as he writes and records everything himself directly into cracked copies of Ableton. Dreary guitar tones are bit crushed and followed by whispering digital artifacts.
They form anguished slowcore compositions dragged around by tumbling trip hop beats, a style that has been very popular in indie scenes recently. A track like “Circle Games” adds to this by having strings swell and fade at the song’s breaks. Cousins’ lyrical delivery is dejected and sounds like it’s hissing through tinny cheap speakers. Together it’s all very murky, and listening to it leaves an acidic taste in the mouth. The music of urika’s bedroom gives into notions of a cynical view of the world where anything comfortable or righteous seems to be deteriorating. It’s like it’s dealing with the ramifications of lost hope in sifting through the rot that has been left behind.
For Tchad Cousins, this isn’t the first time that he’s playing at Gabe’s or coming through Iowa City. He was here about two years ago as the touring bassist for Youth Lagoon on the Heaven is a Junkyard tour. There he looked like he was thrilled to be performing. He said he didn’t remember much from the show, but he did remember exploring a collection of Neil Young pedals at the house he was staying at that night. He’ll stand on stage at Gabe’s again this Tuesday. Behind all the constructed mystery, maybe there something about urika’s bedroom will be revealed. The performance is free for anyone to see.
