Runnner - Like Dying Stars, We're Reaching Out - LP - Cloudy Clear Vinyl [FEB 17]

LP - Limited Edition Cloudy Clear Vinyl.

For the last five years, Los Angeles-based musician Noah Weinman has been Runnner, and for much of those five years, Runnner has been working. Working on his 2021 collection album, Always Repeating; working as a producer on the Skullcrusher records; and, of course, working towards his debut full-length, Like Dying Stars, We're Reaching Out. From LA to Ohio and the Northeast and back, he's been deep in the craft of sound. This is music made at home, using anything and everything: cell phones and handheld tape recorders, the hum of an a/c unit, voicemails from friends. Rubbing cardboard together, stretching acoustic sounds out to near liquid, or stacking delay pedals at random to scramble the smoothness of a song can make something known into something unknown – something ordinary into something cosmic. These are songs where the edges have been left deliberately rough because perfection invites predictability, and imperfection imbalances, and those imbalances ask the listener to listen again, and again.

Like Dying Stars, We're Reaching Out is the result of years of writing, recording, and tinkering in Weinman's home, a lovingly crafted patchwork of organic instrumentation and otherworldly digital manipulation. The unexpected sounds and lush production elevate Weinman's already impressive skill for melody and warm vocals, always pivoting between sparse intimacy and sweeping grandeur at the right moments.

With humor and heart, Weinman sifts through isolation and anxiety in the everyday: ruining the rice, buying shampoo, the way boredom and loneliness are tangled up together. And from these fragments, he makes something new, but also something already known and felt at once. "A lot of the songs have this narrative arc of rising tension that just leads to me not saying or doing anything," he says. "It's like there's a signal loss between thought and speech." Tracks like "i only sing about food," "raincoat," or "chess with friends" explore these different mental and sometimes even physical barriers to communication, while skittering drum beats and scrappy acoustics guide the listener through Weinman's crowded thoughts.

Often Like Dying Stars, We're Reaching Out sounds like life caught inside a moment, unsure of what comes next, but there is hope and lightness here too. The album's final track "a map for your birthday" closes with the lines "like dying stars, we're reaching out / so much i can't say / but you nodded anyway." Despite our inability to be what we want to be, to know where we are going, feel we belong, to be present, and to present ourselves fully and completely to the world, Runnner offers that perhaps it's this longing to know one another, to understand each other when we're incoherent or when the words just don't come, that just might connect us. 

* Image is a mock-up only. Actual vinyl may look different after pressing.

Tracklist:

Side A
1. plexiglass
2. i only sing about food
3. bike again
4. raincoat
5. chess with friends
6. reach

Side B
1. noah needs a haircut
2. runnning in place at the edge of the map
3. scabpicker
4. string
5. nye
6. a map for your birthday