Shoegaze 5G

Gerlach began playing classical cello at a young age. Frustrated by the rigidity of her traditional training, she started exploring the invigorating and genre-diverse DIY scene in her hometown of Chicago. It was through learning music production in college that Gerlach was able to connect the opposing sensibilities of classical music and DIY. Using her computer as a mediator of sorts, song sketches of her debut self-titled EP (released in 2021) and Shoegaze 5G began to form. Cello became a lucid entryway for Gerlach compositionally. She recorded pop riffs, processing them through extreme, improvised effects. From there, threads of rhythmic synths, sampled drums, and field recordings entwined. In writing through these intuitive, tangential structures, Gerlach began to notice a pattern. Oftentimes, she’d take a left turn from clean production to messy distortion, effectively transforming her cello and wavetable synths into noise machines.

The album’s title Shoegaze 5G winks at this idea. In the same way that shoegaze as a genre abstracts music to dizzying heights, alice does computer music uses electronics to obliterate sounds, making them all the more emotive and poignant. In “Coiled,” acoustic cello is juxtaposed with crushed drums that swirl into distorted, cavernous sound collage. On “Widow’s Peak,” layered riffs pulse through a trance gate, yielding low, warbled humming. The clarity in Gerlach’s vocals cuts through the layered lushness and experimentalism of her production gorgeously. On “Alien Farmer,” she sings of being mesmerized by wind turbines while driving through an apocalyptic landscape of snowy cornfields in rural Ohio. In lead single “Lilypad,” a recurring dream about a total eclipse is referenced, the sky darkened and otherworldly. It’s this dance between reality and fantasy, both lyrically and instrumentally, that allows the songs on Shoegaze 5G to occupy a distinctly dream-like yet wholly accessible realm.