First single “New Day” brings
together the guitars of Valentin’s previous band with electronics of Salaryman side
project. Hear
it now.
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Rick
Valentin as photographed by Gilman Chatsworth.
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PLAY, POST
& SHARE
“New Day” is
the first single from Work The Circuits
by Thoughts Detecting Machines. Hear it via Slicing
Up Eyeballs or at the links below!
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Each copy of the Work The Circuits vinyl is packaged in a one-of-a-kind jacket
created with a pen plotter built and programmed by Rick Valentin. Read more about it below!
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Thoughts
Detecting Machines is the latest
project from Rick Valentin, the man
behind the pioneering late-80’s alternative band, Poster Children and its concurrent electronic side project, Salaryman.
“New Day,” the first single from the upcoming Thoughts Detecting Machines debut album
Work
The Circuits humorously details how supposed conveniences aren’t all
that convenient after all. “This is a
simple song about how things like self-help mantras, life hacks, and fad diets
are supposed to solve problems, but are problems themselves,” says
Valentin. “Musically, I think of it as a
kind of suburban raga that gets interrupted by pogoing guitars.” The track was recently
premiered via Slicing Up Eyeballs
here.
Valentin’s previous band Poster
Children existed at the forefront of new media, blogging, and webcasting
long before these activities were even remotely commonplace in music marketing,
much less in our daily human existence. The band was hosting its own internet
radio show in 1997 (before there was an iPod to podcast to), and most notably,
a song from the 1995 Poster Children
album Junior Citizen was included with iTunes version 1.0.
Launched in the college town of Champaign-Urbana, a
couple of hours outside of Chicago, Poster
Children went on to release records with legendary indie imprints such as spinART and Creation, and also survived a stint with the majors on both Sire and Reprise.
Considering the band’s proximity both physically and
in time to the world of filmmaker John
Hughes, one wonders if there was something in water. Continuing through to Valentin’s current Thoughts
Detecting Machines project, there is a sound of the era that is evoked in
his music that literally feels like an edgier version of the “Pretty In Pink” soundtrack smashed
together into one awesome tune.
Listening to the new material, it seems Valentin hasn’t lost his touch over the
years either, though these new songs have been a long time coming. “When I started Thoughts Detecting Machines, I hadn’t written a song by myself in
20 years,” he explains. “I tried to do the singer-songwriter thing, but writing
songs on an acoustic guitar made no sense to me. There’s just not enough
volume.”
The songs on Work The Circuits merge the punk
rock guitars of Poster Children with
the electronics of Salaryman. Even
the design of the physical packaging is a call back to Valentin’s eternal instincts, exploring the connection between art
and technology, with custom-created covers made using a computer controlled pen
plotter.
“I love the pen plotter,” he exclaims. “It has the
exactitude of a computer with uniform curves and lines but there are also
imperfections. Blobs of color where the pen first sets down, ink bleeding into
the paper and gaps and overlaps where the servos don’t quite guide the pen to
the right location on the page. It’s like the music - a collision of digital
and analog, the perfect and imperfect.”
Work The Circuits, the debut album from Thoughts Detecting Machines, arrives on March 16th, 2015.
Rick Valentin is available
for interviews. Contact Josh Bloom at Fanatic for more information.
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Thoughts Detecting Machines
Work
The Circuits
(Twelve Inch Records)
March 16th, 2015
Track Listing:
02. In the Right
03. The Call
04. The City
05. Bully
06. Fine
07. White Lies
08. Shine Me On
09. Night for Day
010. Say You Will
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Thoughts Detecting Machines Links
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Contact Josh Bloom at Fanatic Promotion
