Today, Peter Matthew Bauer releases his brand new third album, Flowers (out now via Fortune Tellers), along with the focus track and thematic centerpiece, "Chiyoda, Arkansas, Manila." The final single is described as an abstract portrait of anti-cult researchers Bauer met online, drawing on one in particular’s experience and reactions in the abstract. Set against a wall of arp synthesizers, electric guitars, and Matt Barrick smashing the drums, the song ends with a sound that’s something like a good U2 song being drowned underwater.
Speaking on the single, Peter wrote:
"The entire process of making the record, I was chasing this strange archetypal force. It's the electricity at the edge of things, something wild and writhing, like a cosmic snake. I think you can tell its story right now through the rise of conspiracism in American culture and around the world. There is an anti-cult researcher. I guess that's what you'd call her. She is an expert on Aum Shinrikyo. I don’t know her personally but this song is inspired by her. It’s a sort of warning. I know that her writing kept leading me back to the origins of things. It made me go back into my own self and story so that I could relate. There’s something hidden, a rosetta stone just out of reach in her Japanese mountain cults, something in my childhood, all these kids driven insane out in the suburbs outside Washington DC. Something about the Ashram where I grew up in upstate New York - whatever bad things went on behind closed doors there. And whatever you first feel when you're 13 or so, out there at the edges of a city or crossing a railroad bridge with your friends. It's all of that. And then there was a single day. I set the basic demo of this song up as a repeating loop, 45 minutes or so in length, that I repeated again and again into the night. I’d set up a chain of effects that would remain a constant throughout the process of making this record. It was a messy grab bag of delays and distortions and reverbs that I then sang through each line twice in unison. This sound then disguised whatever I disliked, questioned or over-thought about myself and what I was trying to say so that I could write freely and without analysis. And that is what you hear on tape here." Peter was a founder of NYC art rock band the Walkmen (Top 25 most influential artists of the 2000s according to Pitchfork). His newest album and third solo record, Flowers, was produced in partnership with his old bandmate Matt Barrick. Previously, Peter’s solo work has been featured in Rolling Stone, Spin, The AV Club, Flood Magazine, and KEXP. His earlier singles from this particular LP, "Knife Fighter" and "Skulls," were featured in Brooklyn Vegan, Stereogum, Under the Radar, American Songwriter, and Earmilk, and were featured on Spotify's Fresh Folk and Apple Music's Wax Eclectic.
As Peter wrote of his newest full-length project and the process behind it:
"I had stopped writing music for a few years when I started this album. I don't know what drew me back in but, for the first time in a long time, it felt really joyous to be locked in a room by myself writing songs. I'm out here promoting this now and hoping people hear it again but, I think when I started out, I'd abandoned all of that hope and it felt so liberating. I was just able to make music without any care about the outside world. I was able to sustain that for a long time.
This record started with the image of a mountain cult. It was informed by several strangers writings on conspiracism and accelerationism, and my own life growing up in a Catskills ashram, and an open guitar tuning I can’t escape that is D-G-D-G-C-D. And by Frank Ocean's cover of 'Moon River,' and later by the guitar playing of Mdou Moctar. And mostly by this record by Peter One And Jess Sah Bi, this country rock record from the Cote D’Ivoire that showed how country rock could be magical and joyous and strange.
It was also inspired by the same fear that‘s rising in each and all of us. That this is not a good time at all for us or for our children. That a strange force is rising and we are all trying to make sense of it. I was trying to create a personal universe to express that feeling, and to have that fear dissolve as I created it."
To further celebrate the album release, Matt Costa additionally directed a series of live video renderings of tracks taken off the new record, performed by Pete and his band the Quitters at 64 Sound. Today finds the release of live videos for the LP's newest single "Chiyoda, Arkansas, Manila" and its title track "Flowers." | 
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