
#27
Hard Mix: “Now Her”
[from Defaults / Dovecote]
If there’s one artist that I’ve shamelessly extolled my adoration of more than any other on Company Pants, it would have to be Noah Daniel Smith’s project, Hard Mix. As the majority of musicians begin to retreat behind their laptops to create miniature operas and ballads to long lost loves, more often that not, the sounds have all started to blend together into a ball of mush. With Hard Mix, Smith rises above countless other projects with their day-old Bandcamp pages by instilling deep emotion and wistfulness into a genre of music that isn’t well known for either.
Using chopped and screwed bits of phrasing from an old soul song, “Now Her” builds a sense of longing and desperation without ever really being able to comprehend the actual words that are being vocalized. Sometimes, only being able to understand words like “why?” and “now her” are all you need to know that something profound is occurring.