Going by the moniker Pill Super, Caden Marchese is well known for his work with the Denver slowcore band American Grandma.  Also contributing to Midwife’s Forever, Pill Super finds Marchese honing his ear to a liquid form of ambient electronic music that also embodies pulsating synths.

Today Pill Super has dropped “When You See It.”  Marchese says about the single, “Created by stitching together samples taken in New Mexico, Colorado and New York, ‘When You See It’ is the first single from Ghost Reel, a 5-track EP that explores impermanence, intangibility, and loss.”

When Marchese relocated from spacious Denver to cramped New York, he began crafting kinetic, dance-influenced numbers, utilizing Ableton, field recordings, the free-to-use modular synth emulator VCV rack, and friends’ keyboards – the result is the five-song EP Ghost Reel. Considering transition and impermanence, Marchese’s compositions move from the woozily undulating to the entrancing to the meditative, all the while creating imagined digital space.

The phrase “Ghost Reel” considers ephemera across a wide spectrum – “Ghost Reel alludes to the experience when you think of a photo, recording, or cassette,” Marchese explains. “You try to find it, but don’t have it – is that because it never existed? Or did you lose it?” When you consider the artist pulling sounds from the air on a field recording device to sample or crafting in a non-physical space, the “ghost reel” takes on even more complexity. If the thing is purely in a digital realm, if its ephemerality is that precipitous, is it not a ghost?

Marchese’s spatialization is ghostly, too, as well as immersive, creating/construing a space through meticulously fluttering electronics throughout the stereo field.

Photo Courtesy: Stephen Cardone