Building rich soundscapes featuring vivid vocals and high-impact harmonies, the mysterious ArchiveX delivers a whole new kind of sound: gospel-tinged electro-ambient soul fused with blues, rock, and pop.
His tracks are at turns ambient, cinematic or quite euphoric, though all retain hints of a Golden-Era gospel influence (without the religious message).
Like his music, San Francisco-based ArchiveX has traversed a lot of terrain. A former Naval officer, tech reporter, literary editor and session vocalist, ArchiveX began his musical journey by licensing original creative content to cable TV. Still, it wasn’t until 2012, when he was invited to sing with a prominent Bay Area Gospel choir, that he truly found his voice and decided to plunge full time into making original music.
Though not religious then or now, ArchiveX was nonetheless profoundly inspired by the musical energy and emotional forthrightness of classic Gospel.
His music shows many other influences, too – hints as varied as Prince, Radiohead and Tom Waits are readily evident – but his goal was to make a hybrid mash-up of genres that still captures something of old-school gospel’s directness and soul.
This leads us to ArchiveX’s revision of the ’61 Ray Charles classic ‘Hard Times’.
This outstanding rework sees ArchiveX pay homage to the peerless original while recasting its message for a fresh audience, shifting the verses to minor key and darkening the music with electronic brushstrokes. The sound is stripped back, even haunting, and the emotional message is clear: There will be hard times, some perhaps permanent, and ultimately it’s up to you to find the strength to carry on.
In the accompanying video (shot in London by Kamil Dymek and New York by Alex Colby) that message is honed to a sharp metaphorical point as an imprisoned man is forced to rely solely upon his inner resources, imagination and will to persevere within – and even transcend – the harsh limitations of external circumstance.
(The circumstance in the video is more than metaphorical in the mass-incarceration culture of the United States, where the prison population has grown a staggering 700% in the last forty years and where one in every fifteen black men is behind bars.)
With the dark clouds of 2017 looming overhead, it’s a track particularly well–suited to our own troubled times.
ArchiveX’s adaptation is a real triumph.
