Song Premiere: Summer Like The Season's "Thin Today"

A mesmerizing new jam from Summer Like The Season. Trancey, tender, turbulent, and beautiful.



Multi-instrumentalist Summer Krinsky recorded a solo EP under the moniker Summer Like The Season several years ago. She came to Detroit from the Ann Arbor scene, part of the band Pocket Candies, on bass and vocals in that group's indie-rock fusion of jazz & funk. Summer Like The Season now has a full ensemble backing up her arrangements for live performances, with Scott Murphy on electronics/keys, Tasha Peace on guitar/vocals, and Eugene Strobe on bass.

Summer Like The Season,
photographed on their most recent tour

Intricately woven atmospheric swoons and feverish tones swirl and center around Krinsky's percussion and vocals, both of which can go from something like a tender shuffle or sway and into something crashing, bracing, and soaring. Like Laurel Halo (another superb music maker that came out of Ann Arbor), or perhaps tUnE-yArDs, Krinsky's keenly fusing ambient techno, world music and free-jazz, but her newest tunes can add the fierier radiance of guitars and bridge it closer to something like 2014-era St. Vincent.

I hate dropping names like that, but as you can tell from listening, Krinsky's got a knack not just for layering her production, but for turning unconventional elements like pitch-shifted vocal loops into a melodically droned hook; the way that wordless vocal traipses into a twirl--it gets stuck in your head. But then the rest of the soundscape comes to life, with those icy synths, the minimalist guitar, the blend of sequenced beats and drums... It builds towards that bridge, where, if you're listening close enough on those headphones, you can float right off over the railing when she chops up the vocal samples and threads them across a broken-up splay of spurts so as to meld her voice into the percussive pattern.

A bit of an electronic experimental whiz, she's built custom MIDI controllers that connect to various software for processing the storm of synth signals. What Summer Like The Season can do is effectively blur the line between the comparatively more organic sounds of a guitar, or live drums, to the synthetic dreamscapes of synthesizers and samples. But its really her voice, not just the performance of it and the power of it, but what she's able to do with it through the sorcery of her electronics rig, that really illuminates their songs.

Summer Like The Season joins Sonny Dulphi, Peter Piek, Blackmoore, Paper Rockets, and Ma Baker at Spaulding Court this Saturday, part of COALESCENCE, an outdoor music and art exhibition presented and curated by Gallery Bypass.
Local and international installation artists contribute their visions to the preservation and enrichment of this historic pair of inward facing stone row houses at 2737 Rosa Parks Blvd. Click here for more information.
And follow Summer Like The Season here.