Put on your goggles: Area Resident is back to boil your brain with his new single and video Operation Cue — premiering exclusively on Tinnitist.
The first preview of prolific Ottawa singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Doug Hempstead’s upcoming album Orgone, Operation Cue drops you at Ground Zero of a psychedelic post-nuclear landscape somewhere in the charred desert between Pink Floyd and Guided By Voices. It’s a slowly burning, eerily glowing afterworld where guitars pulse and throb like radiation, unseen technicians issue instructions and countdowns, and Hempstead’s dreamy vocals drift, swirl and fall like clouds of atomic dust. And it typical fashion, Hempstead’s surreal lyrics have both feet on the ground even as they reach for the stars.
Operation Cue, he explains, “was the name of a 1955 atomic bomb test conducted by the U.S. to determine the effects of a blast on suburban homes and hydro infrastructure. I tied that together with the recent news of an approved nuclear waste storage facility in Chalk River, Ont. and name-dropped former president Jimmy Carter, who personally helped avert a disaster in Chalk River in 1952 during a partial meltdown.”
A journalist for more than two decades, Hempstead often tears strange-but-true tales from the headlines for his songs. There are Area Resident cuts about a man who smuggled gold pucks out of the Royal Canadian Mint in his bum, a high-speed chase thwarted by a swarm of angry bees, a giant sinkhole which permanently imprisoned a locksmith’s van, and even an ode to the tragic demise of a wallaby who escaped a petting zoo during a storm.
Hempstead records most of the tracks at home and shares them with collaborator/producer Jordon Zadorozny (Blinker The Star), a life-long friend. Zadorozny provides overdubs — he played drums and percussion on Operation Cue — along with mixing and final production.
What’s a bit odd about the process is the songs are never written before they are recorded. Hempstead has ADHD and finds the songwriting process more enjoyable, fruitful and expedient to just see what develops — usually trying to start each song with a different instrument to keep the sound varied and as band-like as possible.
Since 2016, Area Resident has opened for Guided By Voices at Ottawa Bluesfest, and been a featured performer at Megaphono, Barnstorm and CityFolk Marvest festivals. Past collaborators have included Miche Jette (Flecton Big Sky), John Higney (Flaps, Two-Minute Miracles), Dave Merritt (Golden Seals), Chris Church, Thomas Marolda (The Toms), Dave Draves (Little Bullhorn Studio) and Catriona Sturton.
Hempstead has put out a series albums since 2016, all of them enjoying college and community radio chart success. Due in late spring or early summer, Orgone will be his ninth release in as many years.
Watch the video for Operation Cue above, listen to it on your preferred streamer HERE, check out more from Area Resident below, read his columns HERE, and sign up for more musical experiments at his website, Bandcamp, Twitter, Instagram and Facebook.
