The idea went that Erin Fein felt as though she was making music for and with a sibling, an identical second person, when she called her project Psychic Twin. Everything would counter everything else, running parallels and harmonies, similar voices saying similar things but never quite the same. Tracks like the somnambulant, psychadelic “Dream State” seemed to push that forward, a range of octaves working in tandem but never quite one, always perfectly detached.But all that was a long time ago. It’s been three years since the release of the Strangers seven-inch and Fein has been unprecedentedly quiet in terms of studio releases.So her new collaboration with Chrome Sparks, premiering on Noisey today, comes both as a welcome return and a perfect addition to the duality of her sound. The 25-year-old Brooklyn-based electronic musician, also known as Jeremy Malvin, works his 80s driven, synth-layered tracks into all-consuming bursts of conflicting melody. Here, it’s the perfect foil for Fein’s Psychic Twin, a 20 minute mixtape of swirling atmosphere and drama.In an email to Noisey this morning, Fein talked about how the collaboration came about: ”When I was finished recording these songs I dreamed up this beautiful idea of teasing them out to the world by letting another like minded artist reinterpret them and hide bits and pieces of them within their own creation. I thought about a lot of different artists that could re-imagine the music, and hold on to the emotional depth that exists in it for me. Chrome Sparks immediately came to mind, I had actually very randomly received a ride home from Jeremy Malvin a year ago in Greenpoint, but other than that had just been a fan of his music. Perhaps some line of energy brought us together, because luckily he connected to the project and understood the vision we were attempting to accomplish. In the end, it turned out to be as good of a match as I had hoped. When I hear the mixtape I feel as emotionally connected to it as I do the original compositions.”Check out the Chrome Sparks Meets Psychic Twin mixtape below and keep an eye out for new Psychic Twin music over the coming months on Polyvinyl.
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