Maymind, the moniker of LA based musician / producer / DJ Leo Maymind, is poised to announce a brand new release with the arrival of ‘Find You’, lifted from the forthcoming album ‘June’ due this November.
Fusing elements of left-field electronics, hazy late night grooves and an irreverent post-punk ethos; the accompanying visual clip conjures an arresting, surrealistic otherworldliness.
Leo explains: “‘Find You’ is a halfway point from the past, as it sees me returning to the mic for the first time since my Spanish Prisoners days. Director Drew Hagelin and I shot this video on location in Joshua Tree, CA and Los Angeles, CA over the course of a few very hot days. Drew proposed using Joshua Tree as a location for part of the shoot without knowing that that was where I had recorded some of June, so there was a nice serendipity there. The whole experience brought me back to my days of background acting work in New York City, which I did for about 7 years, appearing on Girls, Broad City, True Blood, and many other shows, though usually only blurry and in the background.”
He goes on to add: “The video explores themes of sleepwalking and the collective unconscious. Hagelin described the video as representing the idea of ‘what it might be like to interact with a representation of your unconscious self that only your subconscious could create. How recognizable would you be? Which version of yourself would have the most agency? How disturbing or funny or full of meaning or devoid of meaning would that experience be? Probably a combination of them all.’ Both Drew and I love things that are weird and just slightly off, and this sleepwalking character in Find You really let us explore those tendencies.”
Born in Riga, Latvia when it was still under Soviet rule, raised in New Orleans and across the Midwest, a feeling of ‘otherness’ has always felt normal to Maymind. Leo recalls: “I never had a real ‘home’ growing up. My home was in my headphones. Seeing street performers play jazz in the New Orleans’ French Quarter left indelible marks on my young soul.”
A restless musical curiosity led Maymind to move to New York City after college in hopes of expanding his “band” Spanish Prisoners, a solo project that Maymind created in the hopes of collaboration. In 2015, after quietly switching modes and swapping his guitar for a sampler, Maymind resurfaced on Adam Marshall’s steely New Kanada label with a three-track EP of Detroit-flavored techno that crammed bright details into its every corner.
In 2016, a move to Los Angeles signaled another change in approach for Maymind, when a computer crash forced him to limit his gear to a small tabletop hardware setup. The result was Maymind’s first full-length album ‘Illumina’ (Umor Rex, 2017), which blended flanged, wiry drums with thick ambient pads and malleable synth trills; drawing praise and radio play from WFMU, the Wire, Red Bull Radio, and more.
Maymind‘s 2018 album ‘Cheap Storage‘ on Atlantic Rhythms was described by PITCHFORK as ‘sharp and focused’ with ‘gratifying soundscapes that are easy to sink into’. The multifaceted artist continues his foray forward in the form of ‘June’, a complex, fascinating body of work due to land on 5th November. Leo says: “These songs subtly point to all the things I’ve loved at various points of my life- R&B, house, disco, sample-based electronic music, spiritual jazz and much more. To me, this album just feels like a complete sentence- something I’ve been trying to say for years but didn’t quite have the vocabulary at the time.”
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