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How the internet resurrected Sweet Trip

A s long as there has been art, there has been characterisations and stereotypes placed on artists, the most recurrent and best known being the idea of the starving artist, who works and works despite their brilliance in life, penniless and destitute, only to die with their work to be appreciated after death. J.S.Bach died in obscurity, yet is often held as one of the most important composers in the western canon , rehabilitated after hundreds of years. The advent of the digital age , however, has transformed this process from hundreds of years to a mere decade, to the point where even modern artists forgotten almost entirely by the world can have their careers resuscitated.

Sweet Trip is the musical collaboration of synth virtuoso Roberto Burgos and singer and pianist Valerie Cooper, a union formed in 1993 at a high school talent meet born of a love of similar music. A series of impromptu jam sessions later and Sweet Trip was formed, a small timey electronic/shoegaze trio that had no real intention of scoring big or playing into convention in the American indie scene. Sweet Trip simply existed to do their own thing, which over time would more esoteric and monolithic in scale. Outsider artists in a sense, and never invited to festivals, Sweet Trip would plod on and produce their most important record in 2003 – to zero fanfare and little reception.

An hour and 13 minutes of pure unrestrained creativity- V:D:C is wildly experimental and as of the present day, championed as one of the most ahead of its time records of the 2000s

Said record, Velocity Design Comfort,  is, given this context, absurd. An hour and 13 minutes of pure unrestrained creativity- V:D:C is wildly experimental and as of the present day, championed as one of the most ahead of its time records of the 2000s. A blend of the IDM of Aphex Twin and the shoegaze sensibilities of My Bloody Valentine and Slowdive, V:D:C is a gleaming jewel amongst a sea of American indie that never so much as broaches the style and charm it possesses that went, perhaps to Sweet Trips’ expectation, unrewarded and misunderstood. Burgos notes in an interview of being told to play the rest of the band’s discography live- as “people will like that better”. Sweet Trip looked doomed; to live out life as starving artists whose brilliance would be disregarded while they were together and would only be discovered in later years.

Sweet Trip put out their excellent yet wildly more conventional You Will Never Know Why in 2009. While well received and praised, the stylistic leap was almost regressive, the lofty aspirations of V:D:C left by the wayside. In 2013, Roberto Burgos would pull the metaphorical plug on Sweet Trip, posting on his SoundCloud one last song: ‘things to ponder while falling’. The description read “probably *not* the last Sweet Trip song ever”- but the intention was clear. Beyond a small release on their label’s compilations and a compilation of album scraps (the surest sign a project is dead), Sweet Trip was over.

Sweet Trip was doomed to a tragic fate, yet the information age has interrupted that tale

So how come in 2021, I am sitting with a new Sweet Trip record before me? 12 long years down the line and Sweet Trip is as alive as any current musical project; an hour and 9 minutes of brand-new music, immaculately polished and presented. Sweet Trip were doomed to a tragic fate, yet the information age has interrupted that tale. What began in small forum discussion of V:D:C by the most dedicated music fans has grown over years, the recommendation passing by like a virus; a testament perhaps to Sweet Trip’s musical skill. As a small fanbase arose around the record, calls for a vinyl reissue of V:D:C were begged for and with this pressure, in 2019, Darla Records reissued it. This clear desire for more Sweet Trip reaching the ears of Burgos and Cooper, 2020 seeing our first taste of new material from the band, followed by a single in 2021. And now a brand-new album sits before us, as if no time has ever passed.

The ability for an algorithm to recommend such an overwhelming amount of music has made streaming music in 2021 feel almost outside of time. These events have occurred so recently, that the fact there has been a 12-year gap matters not to new fans. I discovered Sweet Trip in 2019 and with the pandemic changing perception of time anyway, the wait has felt almost non-existent. Sweet Trip’s story is fascinating on a multitude of levels; it’s a clear story of how the internet has changed how we consume and approach media, a musing on the end of time constrained genres due to mass music accessibility and plainly, incredibly inspiring. If Sweet Trip were able to come back, which other forgotten artists can the internet restore to rightful appreciation? Only time will tell, but I’d rather have more stories like Sweet Trip’s and less like Bach’s. 

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Sweet Trip | A Tiny House, In Secret Speeches, Polar Equals

Sweet trip’s first album in over a decade builds upon the band’s typical aesthetic while blending that sound to produce the group’s most coherent release to date..

In certain corners of the music-listening internet, the release of the first new Sweet Trip album in over a decade is an event on the scale of a hypothetical Portishead reunion, or any of the actual returns in the last decade from message board favorites like The Avalanches, Duster, or Hum. At different points existing as a trio and quartet, and now a duo, the group released three albums over a 12-year span that received niche acclaim for their audacious collages of various sub-genres within electronic and indie rock, with Sweet Trip’s warmest moments resembling the tasteful repose of Stereolab, and their chilliest in line with the techno-futurisms of late ‘90s IDM. The group has been mostly quiet since their last LP, 2009’s  You Will Never Know Why , and the following decade was certainly kind to these aforementioned contemporaries, all of whom toured and released long-awaited new material that appeared in step with an updated indie music climate.  A Tiny House, in Secret Speeches, Polar Equals , the new Sweet Trip album, arrives nominally on-trend with these other returns, though — in keeping with the singularity of the band’s artistic project — still existing outside modes and scenes, its main points of comparison the stylistically expansive (if quantitatively limited) Sweet Trip discography itself.

Fortunately, the group’s oeuvre encompasses at least half a dozen different genres and sub-genres, so this is by no means a scant sonic palette. Where previous Sweet Trip albums occupied a more distinct aesthetic perch — like the glacial terrains of  Halica: Bliss Out v.11  or the dark-night-of-the-soul dream pop of  You Will Never Know Why  —  Tiny House  instead provides a more holistic blend of blends, synthesizing the sounds of the group’s earlier releases into their most direct, linear batch of songs to date. Album opener and title track “Tiny House” begins with an ecstatic, characteristic glitch breakdown that leads into a restrained synth-driven groove, escalating and de-escalating in intensity over enough movements to fairly qualify the song as prog. Many of the tracks in the album’s first half follow similar paths, beginning as ballads and eventually building to power ballad status, with warm synths leading the way and the more eccentric tonalities tucked into the background right until they can no longer be contained. “Eave Foolery Mill Five” and “Snow Purple Treasures” are quality examples of this form, as is “Chapters,” on which clean, insistent guitars are upended by cascading digital percussion that overwhelms the song and carries it into a desolate, affecting strummed outro.

Tiny House ’s back half is more varied in shape, offering a mix of song-length exercises (the bright, buzzing instrumentals “Randlift” and “Zafire Melts the Heart in Modulation”) and some of the album’s more direct cuts, like its lone single “Walkers Beware! We Drive into the Sun.” If there’s perhaps a sense that the group’s creative summit is less consistently reached in these shorter excursions, and more broadly in the context of this more streamlined revival, it remains a unique pleasure to hear new music from Sweet Trip at all. Certainly, it’s hard to begrudge the band a more approachable release in this moment when their return seemed so improbable, with the album itself serving as something of a monument to two friends resuming communication after losing touch for some years. The back-to-back pyrotechnics that arrive on  Tiny House ’s last two songs, “Polar Equals” and “At Last a Truth That is Real,” return the group to the broader canvas on which their talents are most awe-inspiring, delivering fuzzed-out guitars and emotional bombast worthy of M83. Though moments like these appear less frequently on  Tiny House  than albums past, their scale and scope remain uniquely Sweet Trip, in presence as in absence an island unto themselves.

Published as part of Album Roundup — June 2021 | Part 2.

• by Michael Doub
• Obscure Object

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A Sweet Trip of Sweet Trip: A Guide Through the Cult Favorite Band’s Best Songs

• By: Joe Hoeffner
• June 2, 2021

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Engaging with the music of Sweet Trip is a very personal thing. That’s true for all music–the thesis of this very blog is that the listener forms their own story when listening to a song based on their own experiences–but it’s especially true with Sweet Trip. A Sweet Trip song is never just happy or sad: even their most upbeat moments have a wistful undercurrent, and even their most melancholy songs have a certain sense of wry serenity. This ambiguity extends to their albums:  Velocity : Design : Comfort  celebrates the possibilities of the future while hinting towards a deeper alienation, while  You Will Never Know Why  contains devastating ballads and peppy Stereolab-esque pop. Different people with different imaginations will hear the same music and come away with different conclusions.

As such, my ten favorite Sweet Trip songs will look very different from someone else’s. I don’t mean to position myself as an authority–Roby Burgos himself is reluctant to declare himself an authority on his own music, not wanting to override what fans might think–but since they released a new album and I had the immense privilege of interviewing Burgos , I want to share ten songs that I think are essential to understanding the unique beauty of this band. As ranking these songs would be like choosing a favorite puppy from a litter, they’ll be listed in chronological order.

“Fish” (from  Halica: Bliss Out v.11 ):  It’s not quite accurate to say that Sweet Trip arrived fully formed. Their debut album,  Halica , had elements of both ambient techno and shoegaze, but they didn’t always synthesize the two as neatly as they would in the future. Still, they had blissful soundscapes down pat, and the album’s opening track, “Fish,” still stands among their best. Clouds of synth and guitar drift across playful, clattering drums, while Valerie Cooper’s voice lilts and echoes like a mysterious spirit singing as she bathes in the depths of a cave. Even as it gets noisier towards the end, “Fish” still feels like a dream, a burst of optimism and possibility.

“Dsco” (from  Velocity : Design: Comfort ):  Considered by many Sweet Trip fans to be their best work (it’s ranked the highest on Rateyourmusic, the music nerd haven where I cut my teeth writing amateur reviews),  Velocity : Design : Comfort was where Sweet Trip truly came into their own. On  Halica , the electronic and rock elements were starting a tentative courtship; here, they’re happily married, and the result brims with imagination and joy. “Dsco” is  VDC  at its most optimistic, with vibrant pop hooks and crunchy rock candy guitars suggesting a glorious futuristic playground: it sounds like a utopian soda commercial in the best possible way. But while the lyrics invite us to “spread the towels and bring out the lotion” and “synchronize your time in motion,” the pleasure is tempered by the need to escape from something: “run away to the sun, to the comfort.”

“Velocity” (from  Velocity: Design: Comfort ):  Sweet Trip’s brilliance comes in part from their musical versatility. They’ve always delighted in genre fusion, but you get the sense that they could have been a pure dream pop band or a pure ambient techno outfit and been just as excellent either way. Case in point: “Velocity,” a straight-ahead IDM suite that stands tall alongside the Autechres and Venetian Snares of the world. While some IDM gets too caught up in its own cleverness, “Velocity” is endlessly evocative: its looping synth haze and sputtering drum crunches summons a world of blue holograms and jagged chrome skylines. Everything about it is pure cool, down to a distorted lounge-y piano put in the mix towards the end, but Cooper’s periodic vocals hint at a desperation and a loneliness behind all this opportunity.

“Chocolate Matter” (from  Velocity : Design: Comfort ): There’s something great about a band that knows exactly what its listeners want. Take “Chocolate Matter,” which comes towards the end of  VDC  and provides a dizzying rush of catharsis. It starts out as a catchy, lilting shoegaze song, not far off from You Made Me Realise -era My Bloody Valentine. Then, an absolutely thunderous guitar riff that sweeps in out of nowhere, sticking around just long enough to get you addicted before disappearing for a buzzing synth solo and another verse. “This is all great, of course,” you catch yourself thinking, “but I really hope that huge guitar riff comes back.” And then it does! And it repeats over and over again until the end of the song, growing louder and more ecstatic until it feels like your headphones might break! And it’s awesome!

“Acting” (from  You Will Never Know Why ): Musically,  You Will Never Know Why  is a lovely moonlit shimmer of an album, forgoing the noisier shoegaze and IDM parts of Sweet Trip’s sound for pure dream pop bliss. Lyrically, however, it gets dark, going into thorny, personal territory. “Acting,” an early highlight, gets a lot of mileage out of that juxtaposition. It’s a long, sprawling song, with a psychedelic outro left over from the  VDC  sessions, and the rich sounds make the lyrics dig their claws in deeper. “Don’t speak of golden dreams,” Burgos sings over a fast-paced, jazz-inflected section. “You once had a chance to make things right.” The “acting” described in the title refers to “acting on regrets,” but when Burgos coos “so sad, so sad, so hopeless,” the cruel joke of the title’s second meaning comes in. It’s the most luscious world’s-smallest-violin ever recorded.

“Milk” (from  You Will Never Know Why ): While “Acting” was acidic and bitter, “Milk” is just devastatingly sad. With its jangly acoustic guitar and yawning pedal steel, “Milk” sounds a little like Mazzy Star’s “Fade Into You,” but while that song is an expression of romantic intimacy, “Milk” is about the loneliness of drifting apart. According to Burgos, “Milk” is about an insomniac watching their lover sleep, jealous of their peaceful rest. But in the song’s bittersweet tone, it’s clear that the divide is deeper and more complicated than that. “You will drift away/and I won’t mind,” Cooper sighs, and she means it. “Don’t you drift away,” she pleads afterwards, and she means that, too.

“Your World Is Eternally Complete” (from  You Will Never Know Why ): One of the album’s most upbeat offerings, “Eternally Complete” has plenty of darkness in its lyrics, but this time the darkness is being pierced by the light at the end of the tunnel. It’s a fast-paced pep talk of a song, with Cooper’s sweet, bell-like voice encouraging you to “carry yourself through the frozen desert” and “empty your thoughts into the well of pressure.” It’s a lot to ask, but it’s a testament to Sweet Trip’s empathy that it feels possible: it really does feel like they’re in your corner, and if they think you can carry yourself through the frozen desert, then, hey, why not give it a shot?

“Things to Ponder While Falling” (from  You Will Never Know Why Outtakes ): When “Things to Ponder While Falling” was posted to Soundcloud in 2015, the description said that it was “probably the last Sweet Trip song ever.” Thankfully, that turned out not to be the case, but if it really was the last we’d hear of them it would have been a wonderful coda. The first half of “Things to Ponder While Falling” is a gentle, almost halting lullaby, with Burgos and Cooper singing from the point of view of an outcast (or just an agoraphobe) hiding in their home from the “wounds of coyness and shame.” It’s not a happy song, but there’s a sense of peaceful resignation: if you’re falling, you may as well close your eyes and drift off before you hit the ground. Then, right when you think there’s nowhere else to go, a surge of guitar kicks in, and you get your second wind along with the band.

“Chapters” (from  A Tiny House, In Secret Speeches, Polar Equals ):  When any band returns after twelve years, it’s natural to wonder what might have changed in their sound and what new approach they might take. In the case of Sweet Trip, they didn’t radically alter their sound for  A Tiny House, In Secret Speeches, Polar Equals , but they did take everything they had done over their discography and put it all together into one lush, swooning package. Everyone who likes Sweet Trip will find something to like on this album, and “Chapters” may end up one of the best-liked songs of all: starting with a glitchy acoustic strum that recalls the warped warmth of Fennesz’ Endless Summer , it becomes a psychedelic swirl of guitar, synth, and voice, achingly tender and romantic. “Hand in hand, electrified/I will love you,” Burgos and Cooper promise, and the sentiment is earned.

“Snow Purple Treasures” (from A Tiny House, In Secret Speeches, Polar Equals ): There’s nothing tiny about  A Tiny House . Although it’s not the longest album Sweet Trip’s ever made ( VDC  beats it by about four minutes), it’s definitely the most ambitious, aiming for transcendent romantic bliss at every turn. In the wrong hands, it could be exhausting, but with songs like “Snow Purple Treasures,” who could complain? Not unlike “Chapters,” it opens with a sparse acoustic strum and delicate vocals before expanding into the stratosphere, but there’s always something twilit and elegant to its sound. In short, it sounds like its title (the best Cocteau Twins song title Cocteau Twins never came up with.)

“Polar Equals” (from A Tiny House, In Secret Speeches, Polar Equals ): If you wanted to narrow Sweet Trip’s entire discography down to one song, it might be “Polar Equals.” Sure, it lacks the gorgeous vocals that are essential to the band’s excellence, but it contains just about everything else: dreamy peals of guitar, brilliant blossoms of psychedelia, even a return to the blippy IDM of VDC. And to finish it all off, there’s a beautiful outro that shimmers and glimmers and darkens like black butterfly wings. It’s a perfect reminder of what Sweet Trip is capable of, and it’s when it finally sunk in that one of my favorite bands was back.

Joe Hoeffner

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YMMV / Sweet Trip

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• Awesome Music : All of their albums to an extent, but most people will point you towards Velocity: Design: Comfort and You Will Never Know Why .
• Cult Classic : Velocity: Design: Comfort and You Will Never Know Why are shaping up to be this.
• The downbeat lyrics of You Will Never Know Why are thought to be inspired by Roby and Valerie's personal breakup and their struggle to handle it .
• Their reunion album A Tiny House, in Secret Speeches, Polar Equals , was well received upon its release, but experienced Hype Backlash when it was revealed that the title of the song "Eave Foolery, Mill Five" was discovered to be an anagram for "Valerie, Love of My Life". It was soon discovered that Roby hadn't quite gotten over the split and became increasingly predatory towards Valerie, who had since got married. This lead to an altercation between the two, and ultimately brought the band to a close.
• Signature Song : "Dsco", although "Milk" isn't far behind.
• Vindicated by History : While not mainstream, during the 90s and 2000s they were massively overlooked even by fans of underground music, and towards the end of the decade were planning to split. By the middle of The New '10s though, they had finally gain a huge cult following thanks to places like /mu/ and rateyourmusic. The new found attention gave them enough encouragement to continue.

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