The sound: drum machine pulses, guitar flourishes, and synth washes. The setting: California by way of construction paper landscapes. Together they are FWY!, a project distinctly focused on the sensation of driving—all the work of San Francisco resident Edmund Xavier, who takes us through its inseparable elements below.
Cruisin’…
Irvine, California: a planned city, a snow-globe of modern pleasantry, “a community where people can live, work, and play in an environment that is safe, vibrant, and aesthetically pleasing,” they maintain. A good stretch of it is taken up by the business grid—rows of vanilla buildings pristinely landscaped, palm trees and all. While monotonous and at times disorienting, this streamlined metropolis does possess a certain magic, once you’re free of whatever agenda it is that brought you there. For me it would appear on drives back home—mountains far off behind wide open desert, hints of a coastline nearing, and a rare kind of night-silence only possible in a place so loyal to the nine-to-five routine; commute turned cruise.
Edmund Xavier must see it as well, to have chosen this particular exit off the 405 for such an expansive sequence—its first half locked in a groove, its second cooling down to dusk. The track covers about a third of Any Exit, his latest release with Moon Glyph and further proof that no name sonically suggests the art of driving quite like FWY!. Only a handful of tapes remain.
It’s almost 6PM here, and it’s not impossible to be somewhere else:
The glistening synth and guitar work of FWY! is able to blur direct reference points into something less literal yet more suggestive, experiential, and unique than most tributes to the California coast or driving in general—this isn’t music for cruising, or surf town life-styling, as much as it is music to imagine the sensations and slow-motion scenery attached to doing such things. That means no car or coast required (though having lived there, “Corona Del Mar” flashbacks do come compliment quite well). Get all 42 minutes of San Clemente inside a cassette with rad construction paper artwork, through Moon Glyph.