Exotic Gardens - Drugs & TV

Emotional Response is delighted to present the debut EP of Aaron Coyes (Peaking Lights / Leisure Connection) new project, as Exotic Gardens.  An additional music universe as his love of dub expands to include new wave, goth and acid psychedelics across 5 catchy, bass heavy songs.  

While the continuing journey of his duo band, Peaking Lights, with his wife Indra, earns plaudits and fans alike, his early years as a one-man lysergic music polymath that saw his youth in punk and hardcore bands, expanded during a mid-90s burst of “living in San Francisco” creative expansion, devouring music, genres, and influences for life.  

Started as a sub-project to Peaking Lights and his personal dub excursions, Exotic Gardens pollinates a rich tapestry.  Recording through the pandemic in their then home in Amsterdam, before being archived, assembled, and completed following the move back ‘home’ to the West Coast, California.  

Re-embracing that love of his inner goth, the analogue warmth is all there, now featuring Coyes’ dub-languidity of stripped drum machines, widescreen bass, haunting guitar lines and an almost idle voice to peddle true, raw songs.  

Combined, the pop layer of hooks and tight grooves instantly catch you.  Opener and EP title, Drugs & TV is the perfect anthem for the Exotic Gardens sound, before the “dubwave” of Last Of The Light and Tonite shimmer that yearning melancholy of youth.  

In the almost 10 minute dub house opus Organize Your Movement an appreciation and understanding of the psychoactive properties of the Roland 303 and 909, they also hark to a love of Industrial / Noise bands, a lineage from the death pulse of his cult project Rahdunes through to Sound Design and Sound System culture to the pop-dub psychedelics with Indra, now melded here to include a dark assault, whispering invocations and pulsing pads.  

To close, Turn It On is a roaming multi-genre evocation, an exotic end from this constant troubadour, cassette junkie, record dealer, sound system builder, always looking to get back on the road, to live to roam.  

“I turn it on, you lose your mind’.