Carey Mercer’s (Frog Eyes) debut album 5 Dreams by Soft Plastics will arrive on June 5th, via Paper Bag Records. Ahead of the album’s arrival, Soft Plastics have shared a video for “I Dreamed Of Cold Clean Green Seas.” The, home movie and archival VHS footage was compiled by keyboardist, Shyla Seller (with permission from SFU’s School for the Contemporary Arts). She describes the precise process, working as archivist with a specialty in the preservation of audiovisual materials. “Video tape is a fragile and endangered media with not a lot of lifespan left,” she notes. “And, in many cases cassette and open reel tapes are unplayable because of sticky shed syndrome. To make them playable I bake them in a dehydrator and clean them, but often you still get the noise and degradation you see in the clips, especially if tapes have been stored in humid or warm environments. The dance footage has a good example of an AV artifact known as bearding.”

The influences on 5 Dreams are post-punk, new wave, mariachi, new-wave mariachi, dub, hip hop, goth-rock, taking cues and according gobs of respect to Blixa Bargeld, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Talk Talk, Happy Mondays—all rung through the grime of a northern port city. It’s the interplay of the drums and the gelling effect of the synthesizer, the baritone running downhill with the bass, the trumpets and pedal steel filling up the gaps. Mercer says: “The songs aren’t tied to a cohesive theme, but they do exist in a land that is deeply wet, dark, flooded—occasionally a gilded sun-beam comes out of nowhere and the song just stops and stares in bloody awe at what we are given, what we might see.”

5 Dreams will be released by Paper Bag Records with distribution in Canada through Fontana North and in the US and internationally via The Orchard. PRE-ORDER 5 Dreams now.