Venus Furs is the moniker of Montreal’s Paul Kasner, a multi-instrumentalist, writer, producer and self-described “perfectionist”. In the preceding years, the act has taken many forms, supporting the likes of The Horrors and The Twilight Sad as he worked on refining and determining exactly what Venus Furs was meant to be. After years of hard work and multiple hurdles, Kasner is on the verge of releasing Venus Furs, a rigorously crafted set of songs that voyage heedlessly through sonic and mental terrain in a way that could only be the product of a single idiosyncratic mind. This speaks to his remarkable determination to create the album he long envisioned and has now realized with the dazzling Venus Furs. Once you press play on the self-titled record you’re immediately welcomed into a world of sound that sits at the nexus of psych-rock and garage rock, shot through with grand melodic hooks that echo the British alternative scene that he’s always greatly admired, all produced with a finely-tuned ear and precise hand.
“This album, for all intents and purposes, is just a huge experiment in dealing with minutia,” Kasner says, having arrived at this collection of songs through a years-long process. At first, just sitting with his guitar or piano and letting the sounds suggest themselves until forming a rough shape, he then meticulously layered, carved and contoured them into songs, eventually reaching an electrifying but carefully balanced result. It was his express intention on this record “to capture the energy and feel of a live performance, utilizing the sounds of the live room as much as possible,” and while Venus Furs is filled with furiously-pitched guitars, walls of sound and driving rhythms, the finer instrumental aspects are not lost; each can be picked out from the turbulent blur, but in unison they enhance each other, creating a polychromatic and passionate whole.
Glide is proud to premiere both the song and video for “Living In Constant” (below) a fiery piece of art-rock featuring potent guitar solos and supercharged instrumental buildups. The song describes the final moments of a disgraced priest on his deathbed, while the accompanying video features dancer Marilyn Lucas, in which Kasner describes: “The video and song are paralleled as they both convey similar emotions – the feelings of solitude, reflection and perpetual regret. The spinning dancer, like the spinning mind of an individual in this state, is lost in an unending thought pattern. ”
Director of the video Sean Mundy says, “For this video, we were looking to combine both subtle and overt psychedelic imagery along with graceful movements from a dancer (performing choreography created by herself, specifically for this song) captured from various angles and under various lighting conditions, using colour and silhouettes to further draw in the viewer and complement the track.”
