Photo by Rachel W. Rawle
It’s been 16 years since Salt Lake City’s Iota released their debut album, Tales, and also 16 years since the band’s last release. The dry spell finally ends on March 22 when Iota release their second album, Pentasomnia. It picks up where they left off, playing warm stoner grooves intermixed with trance-like heavy psychedelia and maybe a touch of post-rock. Today, Decibel has the skinny on the band’s new video for “The Timekeeper,” the fourth track on Pentasomnia.
“Continuing on with our album’s core theme of dreaming, “The Timekeeper” visualizes chronology itself as a materialized entity,” says frontman Joey Toscano. “Time represented as form, interacting with our dreamer and its environment at large. As with everything, the Timekeeper proves illusory and impermanent, with no real way to point to where it actually exists. Eventually seeing itself, it realizes there is nothing to see. No tomorrow to guarantee, no yesterday to hold on to. The brilliant artists at Above the Void did a beautiful job of interpreting the concept and rendering it to video in the form of a lush, psychedelic tale.”
The song isn’t just trippy in concept; by the time Toscano is soling, it sounds like he’s fully immersed in the “psych” part of “heavy psych.” “The Timekeeper’ comes with an animated music video that looks like an Adult Swim “Off the Air” segment. It’s a welcome additional component to the music.
Small Stone Recordings are gearing up to release Pentasomnia on March 22.