Blondes

Blondes, the Oberlin College graduates Sam Haar and Zach Steinman, craft expansive, gradually unfolding dance tracks suffused with euphoric space. The pair first surfaced after posting initial recordings to their MySpace page, drawing notice from several online outlets and earning inclusion in Pitchfork’s “Rising” series during March 2010. That spotlight arrived three months before Merok issued their opening release, the five-track 12-inch Touched, whose nearly forty-minute runtime matched the scale of works by early Tangerine Dream and by Delia Gonzalez & Gavin Russom. A sequence of 2011 singles supplied most of the material for the duo’s double-disc self-titled debut, which also contained reworkings from JD Twitch of Optimo, Laurel Halo, Rene Hell, and Andy Stott. Their follow-up, Swisher, arrived in 2013 and sharpened the music’s focus on Krautrock and German dub techno. Rewire, a remix EP, surfaced the next year, while 2015 brought both the Persuasion EP and the limited cassette Rein. In 2016 Crystal Hotel Records issued the four-LP box Wade Guyton Kunsthalle Zürich, documenting a 2013 exhibition of Wade Guyton paintings that featured live contributions from Blondes alongside I.U.D. and James Campbell. The duo then joined R&S Records, which released their album Warmth in 2017.