Deloyd Elze – “Yamaha 250”

Florida-born, Los Angeles-based Artist To Watch Deloyd Elze specializes in a deconstructed form of electronic-tinged alt-country that he refers to as "digital twang." The singer-songwriter-producer, born Jacob Henry Allen, impressed us with his recent EP Nellene and its subsequent extended version, and today he's back with another new single. The extremely pretty "Yamaha 250" weaves banjo and pedal steel, synths and samplers into a softly glowing whole. Allen says:Not long after settling into my old apartment in Hollywood, I picked up a typewriter from a local thrift shop and fell into a daily ritual — writing before my old construction job, or writing when I returned home. Each entry became a small record of what I saw along the drive, and Hollywood, I quickly learned, is a liminal place: extremes on both ends of the spectrum.While collecting my case studies, I'd been experimenting with a drum technique my friend Wilter developed — building stock Ableton drum racks to approximate the fractured, non-repeating logic of an Autechre style drum machine. Over the Autechre style drums, I wrote what became the guitar riff for "Yamaha 250," and later layered in live drum breaks, drawn to h...