Amiture
Brooklyn, NY
Photo by Cyrus Duff
Amiture is Jack Whitescarver & Coco Goupil. Their sound blends underground dance music, R&B, British folk, and the blues in a deeply personal way. Positioned between New York City’s nighttime world and the pastoral isolation of upstate New York, Amiture is defined by their shapeshifting playfulness as much as their emotional intensity.
Whitescarver and Goupil were involved in music their whole lives and briefly performed in a band together in college before taking separate paths as visual artists. It wasn’t until 2021, when the two came back together to flesh out live arrangements for The Beach, that their collaboration really blossomed. Following their reunion, Amiture was reinvented. While the two were originally performing songs that Whitescarver had written alone, Goupil's contribtions quickly exceeded mere arrangements. Goupil's work introduced a sculptural sensibility that changed the band. This is most clearly heard with their reconstruction of “Touch,” which appeared on last summer’s EP Swimmer. With a deep trip-hop groove and a revolving, passionate, & understated guitar melody. What was once a driven, crooning expression of nostalgia became darker, groovier, and more abstract.
By the time Amiture had rearranged “Touch”, the pieces of the puzzle were coming together. The synthesis of Goupil’s unorthodox guitar stylings with Whitescarver’s heartfelt lyrics proved to be a rich union. Whitescarver relocated to Kingston NY, and the two spent the entirety of 2022 sculpting what would become their debut as a duo, the upcoming LP Mother Engine.
Mother Engine began to take form in a dilapidated garage between a sanitation center and a set of train tracks. This would be their laboratory, workshop, and recording studio where they developed a process of working that included a newfound love for sample manipulation. They collaborated with other musicians including Matt Norman (Lily & Horn Horse) and Henry Birdsey, an experimentalist, to bring their production out of the digital landscape of Ableton. Between the tape machine, the amp, the turntable, and the computer, Amiture found magic. Each song is a part of a complex sonic matrix that reflected a vision and a sound neither one could have procured alone, always centered around Whitescarver’s classically trained voice and Goupil’s gritty, tripped-out-guitar sound, merged and then steeped in the traditions of American guitar music, industrial music, and folk melody.
The results are emotional, at times disturbing. On “Dirty,” Whitescarver sings of a last tryst before a lover’s disappearance: “Before you go and leave this town—I want to taste it one more time.” His aching—a recurrent subject—shifts recklessly from lascivious to desperate, against a thumping electro beat slashed up by jagged guitar picking. “Cocaine” is elegiac and haunting; “He is cocaine—He is cocaine—Just like my father,” Jack’s painfully murmuring his sinister Freudian wordplay next to Goupil’s hard- boiled tremolo. It’s on the frenetic warped blues of “Billy’s Dream” that their sculptural process is put on full display. Built from sampled drum loops and a Goupil’s razor-like scratches of guitar, Whitescarver calmly chants “I need remote control—I’m howling in the hole”. His words spiral into a surge of delay and noise that sounds just like the car “Billy” is running away in. Running away from what? The band is careful to never give too much away, leaving plenty of room to freely enter their world of dark American iconography.
It’s Whitescarver’s first breath on Mother Engine’s opener, “Glory,” that introduces and defines Amiture’s astonishing evolution. “I know my shit is pure,” he cries into a sea of rolling guitars and rattling breakbeats. To imagine what shit Whitescarver is speaking of is to imagine an uncut drug, a passion, a memory, a sense of self that whirlpools Mother Engine. Just as much a question of circumstance as a declaration of truth, the band is ready to share a new kind of Amiture, one that is as open to the possibilities of their unified imagination as they are dedicated to the tools and gestures they have spent so long refining. Whitescarver doesn’t let us forget it, and he says it again, “I know my shit is pure."
The Amiture formula is as follows: one part skittering, industrial breakbeats; one part New Romantics gothicism; and another of buzzsaw blues guitar—it shouldn’t work but it does. Darker, seedier, and sexier than previous EPs, Mother Engine sees the NYC duo of Jack Whitescarver and Coco Goupil honing in on their particular sound. If you are to listen to one track let it be “Billy’s Dream,” a lurid, skulking nightprowler of a song that lives somewhere between Nick Cave’s “Red Right Hand,” The Cramps’s “Human Fly,” and Prodigy’s “Breathe.” It’s really only fitting that the album was written and recorded “in a dilapidated garage between a sanitation center and a set of train tracks” as that’s exactly the venue I would expect—and hope—to hear it in, ideally at some underground rave on the outskirts of town. Never forget that goths can party too.
–Stephanie Barclay for Bandcamp
"Some of you will listen to Mother Engine, and its majestic sonic cornucopia will be lost. And that’s okay; not all music is for everyone. But for me and my decades-long quest to explore as much music as I possibly can, it’s an opportunity to rediscover music I remember from my youth. Something about the hypnotic nature of this record transports me across multiple decades when I hit play, opening a portal to my teen years that is far more inviting and refreshing than I thought possible. And if that’s not magic, I don’t know what is.”
-Kirk Gauthier for Noob Heavy
