Chanel Beads — the project of New York musician Shane Lavers — announces his signing to Jagjaguwar and presents the new single/video, “Police Scanner.” Lavers started Chanel Beads as an outlet for his affecting songs that he writes, records, and produces using a roguish blend of synthetic and real instruments. There’s a transcendent layer to every song made by Chanel Beads: half-fabricated-half-truth, each one builds to an inflamed idea of a universal experience.
With Lavers’ emotionally stark, yet intricately produced 2022 singles “Ef” and “True Altruism,” Chanel Beads established a presence in New York’s DIY scene and corners of the experimental music internet. Lavers is often joined on stage by close collaborator, songwriter, and producer Maya McGrory and experimental instrumentalist Zachary Paul, who weave in their improvised voices and instruments, making Lavers’ hard-to-place songs even more unpredictable and all-encompassing.
New single “Police Scanner” employs an unconventional structure to ease listeners into an enveloping mix of imperfect guitar strums, metallic drums, and layered strings. Interjected noises like the sound of a person yelping and a text-to-speech sample create texture, gleaming amid the fried production. It evokes both childlike navieté and post-modern anxiety.
The lyrics relate to feelings of desperation, and an inability to act on those feelings. Lavers says that “it’s an anger at the lack of virtue in the world,” while also recognizing that same absence within yourself. Ultimately though, the sentiment of the song is more sad or empathetic, rather than directly angry or full of blame. The accompanying video edited by Alexa Terfloth is similarly mercurial — a collage of NYC skylines, unsettling online ephemera, and live footage from Chanel Beads’ storied DIY shows shot by Shane Roberts, Jackie Young, and Rin Parker.
Chanel Beads began with Lavers using DJ software to mix together voice memos, wanting to portray sound how you “experience it in the moment,” he explains — whether its a pop hit mixed in with the sound of people talking at a bar and the hum of the air conditioner, or the thin sound of a clip played out of a phone speaker. He eventually began singing atop his eclectic soundscapes, which layer crunchy sonics, hypnotic rhythms, and charged lyrics, and released his Zut Alors EP in 2018.
While inspired by the immediacy of pop music, Lavers is drawn to poor MP3 rips and alternate versions, like demos or live takes, believing that their unfinished quality lends itself to a certain open-endedness that leaves space for personal attachment. Both ethos are present in Chanel Beads, as he elevates manufactured sounds into elegant forms and intentionally prints down his songs to embed them with digital artifacts. With these sonic tricks, he questions the need to strictly delineate music into the real and fake, the funny and serious, and the detached and sentimental.
This fall, Chanel Beads will bring their live show to Europe and the UK for the first time – a full list of dates can be found below. Their debut album is forthcoming on Jagjaguwar.
