Dirty Art Club

Entering the Dirty Art Club is like letting an encyclopedic sample curator soundtrack a vibrant psychedelic cartoon dream. Conceived in North Carolina, fragments of sun-kissed soul and dusty psyche-rock sounds are stitched together and intertwined with live instrumentation recorded in a home studio setup to convey a woozy and soulful experience. It’s a blend that’s been refined on Dirty Art Club’s latest album, Basement Seance, which is themed around sampling rare “old songs and records that barely anybody’s heard" and reanimating them into a new life.

Dirty Art Club was founded in 2011 after a fixture in the North Carolina music scene was looking for a local musician to create a beat tape to accompany an art book called Heavy Starch. The tape became Dirty Art Club’s debut album.

Beyond the metrics, Heavy Starch’s sonic fabric of dreamy samples and clipped vocal snippets established a template that was refined on 2012’s Hexes EP and the following year’s Vermilion project.