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Crying High

Crying High is the new project from Toronto born multimedia artist and psychedelic crooner, D Kleiser. The album is called ♬. You can call it “Music” if thats easier. It was produced in Montreal by D Kleiser, and is a wonderful introduction to the proud world of Kleisonia, and all the artifacts of its inward adventures.

Crying High is vapornoir from Montreal: disco and ebm slowed down beyond dance utility and used as the framework to support late night phone confessional vocals that sing heartbreak, joy, catharsis, pleas and attitudes of gratitudes. On-stage, Kleiser evokes Andy Kauffman’s Hawaiian singer, or coo’s like a delay-and-sweat soaked Slim Whitman; A cheap Angel Olsen halloween costume: A yawn is a silent scream. The voice as Analogue VR: Part banshee on Earth and part Bowie in the bardo. Crying Highs music, lyrics and dancing combine to carry its audience thru a dynamic spectrum of emotion and character: screaming every high, milking every low. Serious face. Happy face! It takes only minutes for an audience to realize that Kleiser is watching each performance along with them.

Kleiser utilizes the raw power of garage band to produce midi-karaoke versions of AM radio hits from deep within the youtube-algorithmic pata-verse. Largely recorded in bed or at the kitchen table, recruiting whichever friends were proximate to sing into that little-built-in-mic-on-everyones-earbuds. Elements of the album (see: trumpet sections, songs about cats/dead friends) belay Kleiser’s desperate affinity for an era when Airplane Over The Sea was the thing, but this music is truly a direct product of its time. Here, Crying High broadcasts little alternative pop pata-communications into the void in an attempt to forgive it. ♬ could  not have been made in any other temporal elsewhere. Sifting thru the mp3 junk yard of 20th century pop culture to cobble together something pretty.

A personal exercise in Memehommage-as-Shadow Work, ♬ comes complete with a solid and timeless moral, simply put: learn to love yourself or you’ll die.