Photo by Dani Pujalte

A chronic criticism on where the modern shoegaze sound has ended up today following a generational resurgence is that it’s all being built on the surface with nothing more than a fashionable sonic window dressing adorned with layers and layers of tapestry to hide what lacks beneath it. You can’t say that about the devastating art which Barcelona-based multi-instrumentalist Ivan Zoloto is crafting under the moniker of Deaf Star.

Damaged into oblivion with blown-out texturization, ambient electronic fissures, and a corrosive heaviness to it that occasionally is balanced out by a fragile lightness in dreamier reprieves, his debut album, Sunset Overdrive, is transcendent of the shallow by pulling you into a personal glimpse of a very dark point in time captured in a scorched freeze frame. It may just be one of the shoegaze scene’s most truly genre-pushing, annihilating examples this year.

Over e-mail correspondence, +rcmndedlisten traveled to Deaf Star’s corner of a different world to discover shoegaze from Zoloto’s perspective. There, he set the scene in vivid detail in visualizing Sunset Overdrive through his eyes and emotions, working on the effort with a genre trailblazer, Barcelona’s surrounding underground rock hotbed, and Werner Herzog as a reference point for the band’s future.

+rl: You started Deaf Star in San Francisco before relocating to Barcelona. There’s a very summer-heat-in-excess sound within your style of shoegaze — hence the apt title of Sunset Overdrive — that feels like a gas ball engulfing the earth or turning metal into molten metal on tracks like “Happy Now?” and “Dim Times”. How have your surrounding geographies informed your creative process?

Ivan Zoloto: The title refers to a very specific view in San Francisco – if you’re driving up Balboa from the ocean around sunset, it looks like everything was re-amped through a Rat pedal or something. At least in my mind. Or reverb into Rat. Every time I’d finish a demo or a mix version of a song, after work we’d drive with my wife around Outer Richmond and Sunset listening to that, revisiting earlier demos, get a pizza, watch a horror movie at 4 Star Theater or something. It was a strange time in my life, with many things feeling unstable, but this one evening ritual being my anchor.

90% of the lyrics were written on the legendary bus no. 1, commuting to/from work. One lady from the bus made it to one of the songs as a sample (“It Went Up In The Sky”.)

And the last stages of the record: recording vocals and mixing were done already in Barcelona. I was at my most nihilistic then, completely disillusioned, disappointed in politics, people, careers — everything, but strangely empowered and energized, instead of giving up.

+rl: For that matter, the Bay Area is well known as being an underground shoegaze and dream-pop hotbed, but I’m admittedly unfamiliar as to what’s happening out there in the Barcelona scene. What’s the Spanish locale’s vantage point on the kind of music you make?

IZ: The second guitarist in the live version of Deaf Star — Nara Is Neus — is a great solo ambient act. There are lots of shoegaze acts here: HEAL and Salvana are good. Dharmacide from Madrid, Arima from Bilbao. Damasco is my new fav local band — it’s hardcore/screamo with alt-rock elements.

+rl: Sunset Overdrive is one of the scene’s more resonant anomalies of the year so far. It’s a disservice to merely call it shoegaze, as you can hear elements of crude post-metal and surface-damaged experimental noise through the ether of its rough glare and warped samples. Which artists, sounds, events, or memories were influencing you during the recording process?

IZ: I wrote an extensive “recommended listening” list for the record — it’s included in the 12” insert in the LP edition!

Echo Is Your Love is a big band for me. “Susurrate” and “Pigment EP” by Ecstasy Of St. Theresa — my personal shoegaze holy grails. Australian band Sea Scouts. Henry’s Dress, Hum, early Bowery Electric, early Jesu. Another Sunny Day, Heavenly.

I also play drums in drone metal band Petrozavodsk. In parallel with the “Sunset Overdrive” process, we were putting finishing touches on “Forest Fire” LP — perhaps, some of the amp-roar and intensity seeped in from that…

+rl: Slowdive drummer Simon Scott mastered the album. Beyond the kit, he’s a renowned sound engineer in his own right who understands thresholds beyond the obvious layers of the genre, which seems like a perfect fit for an album like yours. How did working with him come about?

IZ: I had mostly worked with mastering engineers from the dance/electronic world, so I started reaching out to some rock people, quickly realizing that my idea of rock is very different to theirs haha, and then I remembered Simon offers mastering services, and he responded immediately and said the record reminded him of Medicine’s “Shot Forth Self Living” which is an insane compliment. It wasn’t an easy record to mix, and pre-masters sounded all over the place. I’m very happy with how Simon managed to make it way more cohesive.

+rl: What does the scenery hold for Deaf Star in the near-distant future?

IZ: Looking forward to playing our first live shows as a duo, and hopefully melting some minds and/or speakers!

All of the songs for the next LP are written, and I’m recording the first guitar and vocal takes now. The current vibe of that new stuff can be somewhat described by this quote from a Werner Herzog movie: “When we behave nobody cares, but when we’re bad – nobody forgets!” I’m putting that on the studio wall.

Deaf Star’s Sunset Overdrive is available now on School of the Arts.