Ex-Beta Band-er Steve Mason has debuted Black Affair, the follow-up(/complimentary?) project to his first solo effort, this past spring's King Biscuit Time record. Although Black Affair background info is nearly nil at this point, the beginning of the band's MySpace bio gives a hint as to the nature of the, er, affair:
Possibly the best known and most discussed modern songwriters and thinkers. Born in Paris in 1975, they were educated and later taught in schools in Le Harve and Leon. In 1990 they spent a year at the French Institute in Berlin where they became acquainted with German philosophy and played an active role in the Resistance and afterwards left the teaching profession.
Normally, that kind of fantastical literary wit might raise a red flag w/r/t artistic over-indulgence, but in Black Affair's case, it seems to rightly complement the music currently available for perusal. "It Goes Like This," "You And Me," "Japanese Happening," and "Will She Come" are a surprisingly cohesive collection of lo-fi blip-pop indebted to early electronic music experimentation a la Trevor Horn and the Art of Noise, and Mason's unmistakable vocals dodge in and out of the minimal, piece-by-piece sonicscapes to loopy, hypnotic effect. It's not quite enough to get you out of your seat, but it's got a little bump.
Futher evidence of the cohesiveness of Black Affair's aesthetic is fully on display in the band's first video for the song "Subfuge":
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