Seattle-based musician and recording engineer Kenneth M. Piekarski has been an active face in the local music scene for ages, but they're just now releasing their debut album as Slashed Tires. Check out the first single "Prospective Decline" below, from their forthcoming full-length Don't Party.
Don't Party is a release that dates back to 2011, crafted at famed Anacortes studio The Unknown. After Piekarski returned to Seattle, they continued to evolve the recordings from their renovated recording studio Weird Signals, taking inspiration from artists like Arthur Russell, Sade, and Prince. They reached out to talented friends — keyboardist Aaron Otheim, bassist Luke Bergman, and vocalists Lolli Morlock, Katie Jacobson, and Caitlin Roberts — to help flesh out the sound. And in the end, produced an album they declare "a danceable record about the discomfort of dancing alone in a city where no one dances."
Today's premiere takes you to the party with its '80s-electropop-beat and funky synthesized rhythm. Piekarski tells KEXP:
This is both a linear and nonlinear story about being at a party. There is some casual-romantic wishful thinking, hoping that you’ll see someone or someones, maybe you’re just wandering around, trying to be part of something with everyone.
I was trying to convey my feelings covering different points in time where I had been at events like house shows or parties. This song was written in 2014, late at night in my Anacortes apartment, while experiencing the opposite of what this song is about. I was experiencing a lot of sad self-reflection and part of that was the way that I had been considering intent. Like, when I would put on events or go out to something, what was I getting out of it and what did I really want? I know what I am doing because I put myself in this place but am I getting what I need to feel fulfilled? I want something to happen but maybe whatever that something is, it doesn’t exist or it at least just doesn’t exist for me. But maybe it did but I was just preoccupied with my feelings that I wasn’t able to recognize it and hold on.
Slashed Tires are playing Friday, November 15th at Bailey's Corner Store on Whidbey Island, WA, with LAKE and Your Heart Breaks. Don't Party will be co-released by Off Tempo and Cruisin Records on January 16, 2020.
