Urban Heat

Explanation

For this post, I have a long exposure picture of Urban Heat. This'll be a pretty short post because honestly I don't have a lot to say.

Much like the picture of Pastel Ghost from all the way back in March, this one is just a nice vibe picture. Like that one, I think that the color palette and vibe really fit the artist's name.

Urban Heat is a band out of Austin that is perhaps best described as dark new wave? Industrial post punk? On their site, a local radio host, Laurie Gallardo of KUTX (the music only companion to the local NPR station), described them as "A lightning rod of dark electro/proto-punk/new wave/synth wave/part goth/part industrial sound that is all the things but… simultaneously transcending them into something fresher." Honestly, that description is probably apt, but also lacking. Like a lot of music, not just in Austin but everywhere, it's really difficult to distill how music sounds into words.

In even more ways, it's hard to distill a dynamic performance into words. The frontman for Urban Heat moves across the stage in a way that's simultaneously robotic and animalistic. At times, he almost prowls and slinks across it. How do you describe that performance clearly?

More than that though. For me, how do you express that in a single frame? In more than one way, I feel like I succeeded here with this picture. At a glance, with the colors, orange and magenta and cyan, you get the vibrancy and energy that you expect of their name. With the long exposure, you can feel his motion, pushing through the frame. There's a rawness in his motion there along with a stillness that I think really cleanly comes together.