Ian Devaney, frontman of Nation of Language, thought about the push and pull of emotion in electronic music when working on the New York band’s latest album, Dance Called Memory.
On one side, there are bands like Kraftwerk wanting to push music into more mechanical territory. On the other side, artists like Brian Eno, who wanted to make it as human as possible.
“I’ve read about how Kraftwerk wanted to remove all of the humanity from their music, but Eno often spoke about wanting to make synthesized music that felt distinctly human,” Devaney says in the album’s liner notes. “As much as Kraftwerk is a sonically foundational influence, with this record I leaned much more towards the Eno school of thought. That this thing should be as unvarnished and warm as possible.”
Named for a line in poet Anne Carson’s book, The Beauty of the Husband, the band’s fourth studio album is synth pop with a soul, exploring what happens when loss and change enter your life.
In this session, the Brooklyn band perform songs from Dance Called Memory in a mini-concert recorded exclusively for World Cafe. Enjoy.
This episode of World Cafe was produced by Will Loftus. The web story was created by Miguel Perez. Our engineer is Chris Williams. Our programming and booking coordinator is Chelsea Johnson and our senior producer is Kimberly Junod.