Clock-Out Lounge Presents: Julia Shapiro (of Chastity Belt) w/ No. 2 Record Release,Floored Faces

Clock-Out Lounge Presents:Julia Shapiro (of Chastity Belt)No. 2 Record Release (ft members of Heatmiser, Calamity Jane & Eyelids)Floored Faces Sept 10th 8:30pm doors 21+$12adv/$15 dos Zorked (adj.) – what happens when you end up thunderbaked, as in extremely stonedor in any situation where you feel not sober. You can feel so tired youre zorked. In fact, any state, so long as youre a little out of it, qualifies. And Julia Shapiro, of Chastity Belt, Childbirth, and Who Is She?much like everyone on this earth with a pulsewas zorked on more than one occasion in 2020. In March, she packed up her things and traded Seattles late-winter gloom for the perennial sunshine and seemingly endless opportunity of Los Angeles only to be forced into near-total isolation. With nowhere to go and nothing to do, she began working on her second solo album, Zorked. On the resulting batch of songs, were given Julias vision of Los Angeles: a wasteland melting in slow-motion, a place to commune with ghosts and warped legacies.Living within earshot of a man who spent his entire 2020 singing karaoke for over 10 hours a day, Julia could write, record, and play an albums worth of instruments without fear of noise complaints. Her roommate Melina Duterte (Jay Som) transformed their house into a viable home studio, making it easy to fully realize the sound in her head, even at the height of a global lockdown. Taking things a step further, Melina agreed to co-produce the record, pushing Julia to make these new songs sound less like Perfect Version, her first solo album, or like the songs she performs in Chastity Belt. At the peak of her uncertainty and discomfort, she jumped into the deep end in search of something newand found power in heavy sounds.This is evident in the first few seconds of album opener Death (XIII). Taking newfound inspiration from the namesake Tarot card, drone metal, and shoegaze, Julia layers walls of guitars, bass chords, and programmed drums. Come With Me, the albums lead single, takes inspiration from a mushroom trip gone bad. Take me to awful places now, she sings, envisioning heat death as her own eyes stare directly into the sun. On Wrong Time, shimmering guitars smolder and levitate, yet she finds herself stuck inside this hole Ive dug. That said, these songs arent unbearably sad, nor has Julia become any less of a merciless observer of human behavior. By album closer Hall of Mirrors, shes come full circle. Over fingerpicked guitar, the sense of lost identity becomes all-encompassing. Its the sound of a life lived in servitude to digital screens and the psychic damage invisibly done along the way.Though Julia Shapiro found herself in a near hermit-like existence, writing and recording almost all of the albums instruments herself and struggling to navigate her place in a city and world rendered nearly comatose, she maintains a sense of humor about all of it. At the very least, Its funny to force people to have to say Zorked out loud. Any other title sounded pretentious. https://juliashapiro.bandcamp.com/