Sweet Trip

Velocity : Design : Comfort (2003)

Sweet Trip built their sophomore album from a collision of shoegaze texture and abstract electronic composition — guitar washes that fade into glitch processing that transitions back into melodic pop that dissolves into ambient field recordings, the sequence flowing so naturally that the genre switches only become apparent in retrospect. 'Dsco' achieves a warmth usually associated with analogue instruments entirely from processed synthesizer patches; 'Chocolate Matter' demonstrates the pop pole, a straightforward melodic piece buried under enough processing to qualify as experimental. It took two decades to find its audience, but that audience proved enormous and devoted.

Sleeve notes

Velocity : Design : Comfort · 2003

Sweet Trip made two full-length albums — Velocity: Design: Comfort (2003) and You Will Never Know Why (2009) — and then essentially stopped, which may be appropriate for a project this formally difficult to replicate. Valerie Cooper and Roberto Burgos created a music that placed shoegaze guitar textures alongside glitch electronics and the melodic structures of bedroom pop, and found a way to make all three elements feel native to each other rather than forced.

Velocity: Design: Comfort in particular: a record where the prettiness of the melodic surface and the roughness of the noise elements are in a productive tension, where the fact that the songs are clearly pop songs makes the distortion more disorienting rather than less. Sweet Trip's understanding of digital noise as a texture with its own beauty is the thing most imitated and least replicated in the album's wake. They remain a cult artifact in the full sense: discovered by some listeners who describe the discovery as transformative.