Synth-Pop Artist GEOGRAPHER Announces Release Date For New Album; Shares Track
May 17, 2021 BY Nettwerk
Indie-rock, synth-pop luminary Geographer announces a release date of November 12th, 2021 for his forthcoming album, Down and Out in the Garden of Earthly Delights. Formed in San Francisco, Geographer is the moniker for now Los Angeles-based artist Mike Deni. “I hit a ceiling in San Francisco. I was writing a lot more songs with people in LA, so I moved down. I didn’t really have any friends and just spent way too much time alone, making music. I wasn’t thriving, I was surviving. Everything feels possible here. That’s the vibe of LA: You’ve made it to paradise! You should be really happy…and then nobody is. There’s a lot of darkness — you have to sift through everything to find your own path,” remarks Deni.
While recording his album, engineer Jules de Gasperis showed him an image of the famed, 15th-century triptych painting “The Garden of Earthly Delights,” depicting alternate realities of paradise, hell, and reality. “It’s like, why are we all so bummed out? We are all miserable. And we’re in paradise.” And thus, Down and Out in the Garden of Earthly Delights — recorded between Spring and Winter of 2019 — was born.
Tomorrow, he shares the philosophical title-track “Garden,” which explores the theory of soul mates with utter despair set to pop-inspired synth beats. He adds, “If there ARE soul mates, the chances of finding yours is, well, 1 in 6 billion. So that idea, far from being romantic, actually becomes kind of horrifying. And then it gets even more horrifying, thinking that every relationship we find ourselves in is just us giving up. So it’s a fun love song, in other words. I wrote it when I was desperately alone.”
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Part social scientist, part troubadour, if Geographer is an expert at anything, it’s precisely chronicling life’s imperfections. “Garden” is the latest single off of the upcoming record and follows “The Other Side,” “Keep Running,” “Alibi,” “Love Is Madness,” and “Slave To The Rhythm,” for which he just released an intimate new video, self-shot in quarantine of his partner Monica Reyes dancing in their home. The beautiful full backstory can be found here.
Geographer began in 2007 when Deni relocated to San Francisco from New Jersey, after living with the aftermath of the sudden and tragic death of his sister, and then the equally unexpected death of his father a year later. While sleeping on the floor of his friend’s apartment in the Haight, Deni found a synthesizer on the street, and began to channel both his grief and his optimism into the songs that would become his debut album, Innocent Ghosts. The Animal Shapes EP put Geographer on the map and launched his career. Since then, Geographer has headlined many national tours, played Outside Lands, Firefly, and other festivals, released two critically acclaimed albums, and performed with such musical luminaries as K.Flay, The Flaming Lips, Young The Giant, Tycho, Ratatat, Betty Who, and Tokyo Police Club.
