Zodiac Lovers
“In his early years on Charlotte’s underground music scene, Casey Malone would amble into shows at spots ranging from the Evening Muse to the storied Yauhaus, his guitar and looper in hand, and create stunning works of aural art. No two Malone shows were ever alike. He remembers once playing three separate sets at one venue, each completely different from the others.
Malone laughs. He’s sitting at Boulevard 1820, just minutes from his home in the Wilmore neighborhood, in a worn blue-and-white windbreaker and gold knit cap, talking about My Life in the Bush of Real People, his latest release as Zodiac Lovers…
… But the mad director of this nocturnal urban soundscape isn’t really mad at all — not apparently, anyway. With his crooked glasses, big smile and slightly bemused gaze, Malone could be the hacker with a heart of gold in some ’80s tech-noir flick like WarGames, or a DJ in post punk-era Manchester, England.
Luckily for lovers of homegrown electronic music, Malone is Queen City born and bred. He grew up in west Charlotte and attended the magnet school Phillip O. Berry Academy of Technology. His favorite song as a kid was Bobby Brown’s “My Prerogative.” By the time he graduated, a year early, in 2005, Malone’s musical tastes had expanded exponentially…
… The title of My Life In The Bush Of Real People is a nod to My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, the 1981 collaboration between Talking Heads front man David Byrne and experimental music legend Brian Eno, known for ambient and rock classics ranging from Music for Airports to Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy). For Malone, the strategy in his new work is a bit of a shift, stylistically, for Zodiac Lovers. Like the Byrne/Eno collab, Malone’s Real People utilizes the treated human voice as a disconcerting juxtaposition of man and machine, but while Ghosts seemed to be more of a comment on the rocky relationship between people and machines, Real People seems more like the sounds of people already living in a technologically super-charged world — and feeling every moment of it.” - Grey Revell, Creative Loafing Charlotte
“Vocals slip in and out of the fog, or transform into blips and drones, as lo-fi buzzing and insect-like melodies vie for attention in the complex mixes.”