Today, we are premiering “Valentine’s” from R WE WHO R WE’s upcoming album “I Love You.”
R WE WHO R WE — a project by composer/performers Philip White and Ted Hearne — will release its sophomore album, “I Love You”, on November 17 with a live performance on December 2 in an LPR Presents show at Brooklyn’s Union Pool.
R WE WHO R WE became a project about how White and Hearne sculpt and perform their identities. “I Love You” shifts these ideas about identity onto a fractured set of cultural narratives about relationships, love and masculinity; honing in on the inevitable collisions. In nine original songs, the duo works through disturbed desire, adolescent projections, disintegrating relationships, and violence.
Here’s what Hearne had to say about “Valentine’s:”
“Valentine’s” and the other eight songs on “I Love You” are various vignettes of collapsing relationships, and drawing on a palpable sense of collapse in the U.S. generally–broken social contracts mirrored in personal relationships and a dehumanization of one another.
About R WE WHO R WE
Hearne and White met in 2005 in Charleston, SC as young composers. After diverging on different paths (Ted to Yale for composition and Philip to Mills College for electronic music) the two reconnected in NYC in 2010 and formed R WE WHO R WE. White plays a self-constructed and ever-evolving instrument made of both repurposed analog electronics and state-of-the-art digital controlling devices, harnessing no-input feedback into a mystifying array of luscious sonic landscapes and hard driving dance beats, which the Wall Street Journal has called a “vibrant textural tapestry” and the Village Voice has called “annihilating and enervating.” Hearne, a singer with a massive range of styles and registers (“a vocal hellion,” Time Out Chicago; “fresh and muscular music,” The New York Times), brings an expressive intensity to his performances, embodying a landscape of emotions and vocal color, from the stripped-down human voice to the ecstatically digitally processed.
R WE WHO R WE–Photo by Isabelle Selby