Michael Beach has teamed up with film director Sophia Mero for his new video “Metaphysical Dice.” The track is off his forthcoming release Dream Violence.

Beach explains, “I feel very fortunate to have worked with Sophia Mero on the ‘Metaphysical Dice’ video–her films have an familiarity and lack of pretense that I love, and have a brilliant way of communicating meaning both subtly and overtly.”

“With this song, I wanted to transmit a feeling more than any sort of ‘meaning’, and the film clip manages to elevate that feeling perfectly. Under our recent political and social order, so much of the world felt a sense of doom, helplessness, and a mysterious questioning of the fate of humanity. Sophia’s video has foreboding mystics, bags of money among bags of trash, rats as sole survivors, comets headed for the Bay Area…she nailed it once again!”

Recorded on two continents, Dream Violence documents Beach’s move from Oakland, California to Melbourne, Australia as he navigated a new music scene, plenty of bureaucratic red tape, and, ultimately, citizenship. Parts of the album were recorded and mixed at Tiny Telephone Recording in Oakland, at the end of a 2019 tour with Kelley Stoltz producing. Other tracks were recorded at Beach’s new home in Melbourne, where he worked with Matthew Ford and Innez Tulloch of Thigh Master, with Peter Warden on drums, to capture an off-the-cuff feel.

Dream Violence unfolds like a revelation, filled with sonic tumbleweeds that reference Neil Young’s On the Beach, Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska, the Velvet Underground’s Loaded, and the Go Betweens’ Before Hollywood. Influences ranging from the enigmatic outlier Charlie Megira to Glenn Branca to the Oblivians are combined to create a new, exhilarating sound, part of the path that Beach has been on since 2008’s Blood Courses. A veteran of year-end indie rock round ups beginning with Golden Theft in 2013 and continuing with Gravity/Repulsion, released in 2017, Beach distills the best of those early albums and adds sharpened intent.

Dream Violence is available now via Goner Records in North America and on Poison City Records in Australia and New Zealand.

Michael Beach
Live Dates

April 01 – Melbourne – Northcote Social Club – w/ Voice Imitator (SOLD OUT)
April 21 – Melbourne – Gasometer – w/ Screensaver, E. Bobby G.
May 01 – Sydney – Vic On The Park – w/ feedtime
May 02 – Thirroul – Frank’s Wild Years – w/ Tuffence Meringue
May 22 – Castlemaine – The Bridge Hotel
May 29 – Brisbane – Backbone – w/ Blank Realm, Cannon, Guppy
May 30 – Brisbane – Sonic Sherpa Records