While Cult Canyon is a relatively new name in Chicago, Josh Chicoine has spent decades threading his way through the city’s indie-rock underground, from the psychedelic garage/pop of the M’s to the harmony-rich acoustics of Cloudbirds. With his latest project, Chicoine has hit on a collective approach expansive enough to accommodate every fragment of his musical personality, allowing him to incorporate folk, rock and orchestral textures without worrying much about genre distinctions.
More than seven minutes in length, the original version of “Run Red Lights” can be found on Cult Canyon’s excellent debut, Smoke Tricks (Rattleback). “I made the radio edit just to see what the song would be like,” says Chicoine. “There’s a natural break where me and my friends and singers Mel Brausch-Wilford and Lindsay Weinberg tracked many ascending vocal lines to get to this disconcerting rise to the end of the first half of the song. From there, it’s a straight three-minute groove or whatever, so listeners will have to listen to the full version if there’s interest to see how it all ends up.”
In search of a rugged setting for the video, Chicoine headed to his cousin’s cabin two hours north of Phoenix in Happy Jack, Ariz., home of the Lowell Discovery Telescope. “It’s in the middle of nowhere,” says Chicoine. “My cousin is big into the outdoors and has some drones and four-wheelers up there. The song concerns a descent into a sort of derangement—so with the cabin and other elements, there was a starting point for the visuals.”
To tighten up a slew of footage shot by friend Tim Jacobs, Chicione called on award-winning video editor Tim Cahill at Optimus in Chicago. “I gave him loose reigns to make something cool based on what was pretty much already there,” says Chicione. “I think it’s pretty much on the nose.”
We’re proud to premiere Cult Canyon’s “Run Red Lights” video. Smoke Tricks is out now.
—Hobart Rowland
See Cult Canyon live.