By all accounts, Winnipeg native Ryan Settee, aka High Watt Electrocutions, is a man who writes albums based on a concept. High Watt Electrocutions’ first record, Night Songs (2007) was a collection of precisely that, and the follow-up, Desert Opuses (2009), also delivered on its titular premise. Now with a third full-length (released as the first two were on Settee’s own Introspection Records imprint), The Bermuda Triangle, Settee leaves behind both the desert and the night and works within a different sonic context entirely. If there’s a mission, a concept or a theme to The Bermuda Triangle, it’s daytime, sunshine, wandering, and maybe even getting lost on the way.

The album is available in a limited CD pressing of 500 with hand-painted covers. The songs — or parts, anyway — are presented as one long track topping out at just under 39 minutes. I listened through the album several times, ripped it to see the wav form, and came up with a list of 14 different parts. Settee, as I’d later see on the High Watt Electrocutions website, notes 16, and if you look at the file names for the audio samples there-listed, you can see he gives the parts titles such as “Optimism,” “Inevitability,” and “Washed Out to Sea.” The progression of titles and their occasional interrelation makes it seem likely Settee is forming some narrative that plays out musically on The Bermuda Triangle, but as the track is instrumental save for a small section of non-verbal vocalizing and there’s nothing about it anywhere either on the packaging or the website, that’s merely an assumption on my part. If you want to put a story to it, certainly the music Settee provides on acoustic and electric guitar, synths and swirls is plenty open to interpretation.

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Written last night under the guidance of wine and early-morning swelter.

It’s August in the valley, and aside from the haze that blocks out the blueness of the daytime sky, the unbearable heat and the moths seeking refuge in my office/den, I can tell because the wood of my bedroom door has swollen to the point that I need to throw my shoulder into it to force it open. The air conditioner is a constant electric hum — I can’t sleep without it by now. I sweat for no reason. This is my least favorite time of the year, and thus far, where July was over before I could realize how miserable it was, August seems to be lagging like stale desert air. Living in it is a confrontation I keep losing, and there’s only so far one can retreat.

My usual methods for maintaining livable temperatures — chewing ice, going pantsless, fans, spray cans of water, immobility, etc. — have all abandoned me. I idle my car against the advice of the back of the inspection sticker that says, “Breathe easy, no idling.” I survive on iced tea and contempt. It’s summer. And even though I know better logically and would rather spend my time in nihilistic freon ecstasy, occasionally I need to leave the house.

Such was the instance the other night; a drive out and a drive back a few hours later by myself. I made the trip with the handy typewriter case in which I keep CDs I may need on the go and, on the return journey, the inspiration struck to break out the copy of High Watt Electrocutions‘ Night Songs that band founder/lone member Ryan Settee was kind enough to send me following our interview. I was speeding along Rt. 80 leaning forward toward the windshield to see in a sudden downpour, and it was just the right combination of circumstances to make for what I supposed to be the ideal listen to the record, which I hadn’t yet heard.

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After being exposed to the rich textures of High Watt Electrocutions‘ second album, Desert Opuses, an interview with the creative force behind the band, engineer, vocalist and multi-instrumentalist Ryan Settee, was inevitable. The record is simply too intricate to be explained by a review alone — not that I didn’t try.

Settee, a Winnipeg native who recorded Desert Opuses over the course of a year in his hometown, centered the album around a Middle Eastern theme that sits well on the layered guitars, vocals and percussion. As a follow-up to 2007′s Night Songs, Desert Opuses‘ distant echoes somehow find cohesion as if they’re holding onto each other to make the whole end product work, and though many records claim the mantle of “being a journey” or “taking you somewhere,” if you sit back and let it, Settee‘s latest actually will.

As he prepares to congeal another High Watt Electrocutions release, Ryan Settee took some time out to prepare thoughtful A’s to my nagging Q’s, resulting in an extended interview about his motivations, life in Winnipeg and where his progressive desert artistry goes from here. As always, the interview is after the jump. Enjoy.

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Since High Watt Electrocutions main man Ryan Settee prescribed a headphone listen in the liner notes, I broke out my dusty old pair and went for it as directed. Yes, I do everything liner notes tell me. It?s not a bad way to go through life. Beats religion, anyhow.

Sure enough, as Settee promised, a listen to Desert Opuses (Introspection Records) — the second release from the Winnipeg songwriter/multi-instrumentalist/producer under the High Watt Electrocutions moniker following 2007?s Night Songs — through even the dingiest of headphones proved that the tonal richness and layered density is best experienced at close range and ridiculous volume. The ringing guitars of ?Slow March? that follow the distinctly Middle Eastern tones of ?Ode to Snakecharming? feel like they could eat your head whole and launch you on some psychedelic journey into the rainbow colored belly of a giant lizard. Like a scene out of some acid cartoon. Like Queens of the Stone Age gone spiritual.

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