On the beach of your own imagination

Credits: mf395 by jeltovski, Morguefile license

Indie surf pop with a wink

It is a kind of weird indie surf pop that echoes from the speakers when you put “Milky Way” in the playlist. “Milky Way” is also the name of the weird intro, which reminds you of an alien visitor who finds everything strange on the foreign planet. The mantra-like “Safe Home” repeats the line “I got a safe home” over and over again to a lo-fi guitar until you can no longer believe the song. “Lakes” is a beautiful, dreamy song with overdriven guitars and choral singing, which changes tempo and style halfway through, as if it cannot decide which direction to go in. “Terrible Shame” features shy shoegazing vocals, while “Liberty“ is a lively interlude with amateurish-sounding rhythms. The best song on the digital version is, of course, “Apache“, a tour de force of Native Americans in the digital age, with cool guitars like a brief shredding-punk quote that leads into a final gallop.

Danger Beach’s album is like a sci-fi western – it falls between several stools, and there is a slight impression that the various elements do not really fit together. With the harmonies, they sound like a modern version of the Beach Boys, indebted to a lo-fi garage aesthetic (just listen to “Goodbye Baby”), but the beach is no longer a place of freedom and fun, but a projection screen for the fantasies of one’s own childhood. And “projection screen” is also the word that best describes the cover design in my opinion.

The image within the image as a projection screen

The cover, designed by Stella Rae Zelnik, shows a double beach, a photo within a photo – visualized self-referentiality. The photo within a photo is a stylistic device often used in photography, but always used differently. For example, in the form of nested mirror images in “A Story About a Story” (can be seen here at Kodak Professional as image no. 5 by Duane Michals, who made playing with realities his trademark. On the other hand, David Semeniuk's, series “Landscape Permutations” (iGNANT blog) juxtaposes images of typical American suburbs with other typical American suburbs – the similarity is so striking that as a viewer, I often have to think about whether it is not actually the same place, only taken from a slightly different perspective. One last example: Ben Heine uses the photo-in-photo to highlight differences and similarities between media genres: He places drawings of his surroundings in front of the corresponding environment, playing with the transitions – you can see more of his work here Bilder bei iGNANT.

Compared to these artists, Zelnik’s work is different: the image not only shows exactly the beach in front of which it is held. It is in fact the identical shot, digitally superimposed – this is supported by the identical poses of the people and the absence of a hand holding the shot. Here is how I read the cover: It appears to be an old, yellowed photograph of a beach (similar to the somewhat dated surf pop), and yet there is a play on realities that seems very modern:

• a subject in the foreground is missing,
• the montaged image covers all scenes that take place in the middle ground,
• elements that are clearly visible in the small image (such as the stairs and the building on the right) are cut away in the large image.

In addition, strangely, the beach is completely empty in the foreground, near the camera position, while it appears almost overcrowded in the background. It is this “Come closer to the sea” that I read from the cover, further emphasized by the canvas-like character of the mounted shot - so the beach looks like an empty surface that the viewer has to fill with their own fantasies while listening to the music - like a “projection surface”.

Incidentally, the video for “Apache” is also very beautiful. It is about an Indian who finds himself in the modern world, designed by Ned Wenlock – he explains the background to the idea himself in a motiongrapher interview.