Greg Hatem

In October 2022, Greg Hatem attended a one-week session at South Porch Artist Residency in Summerville, SC which served as the preliminary writing and recording sessions for Sure Circuit. He writes:

"When I arrived at the residency, I was the only one there to utilize the huge studio space - a large and empty room with concrete floors and a natural reverberation tail that seemed to follow my every move like a lost dog. It was in that setting where I realized I needed to make a record about instinct and hard-wired queer identity. About what happens when you are alone with your imagination, what kind of melodies and textures escape from the deep plunge of solitude in an empty room. After a week in SC, I headed back up to Baltimore with several fresh tracks and a newfound focus. In the following months, I completed Sure Circuit at my home in Baltimore."

Sure Circuit consists of twelve, short instrumental tracks ranging in genre from psychedelic indie pop to downtempo. The thread connecting the percussive peaks to the ambient valleys is a reliance on first-take intuition and improvisation as a compositional tool. It is released April 7th on streaming services and CD via Baltimore's illustrious 20/20 Records & Tapes.

"Ghost of Spatula" is a 2021 album recorded by queer Baltimore composer and producer Greg Hatem of the bands Natural Velvet and Moth Broth. A busy artist, Greg often has multiple projects in the works as well as a long history of exploring different aspects of his craft, from playing whispery folk to raging, loud post-punk. In "Ghost of Spatula", Greg has created a wonderfully stylized, instrumental album that is all at once cartoonishly playful and sentimentally evocative. The album features an abundance of human voice samples and synthesizers, drawing its inspiration from library music of the 1980s.

A bit about 80s library music from Greg himself: "Composers on labels like Parry Music and Coloursound were exploring the emerging digital technology very quickly, with the intention of quantity over quality in some cases. Quick tracks that were meant to be licensed for a buck. But every so often, their experiments would yield strange, quixotic, or otherwise queer records, begging existential questions like, "Who would license this? And for what?". It's these records, like Paul Williams' Aquarius or Joel Vandroogenbroeck's Digital Project, that are a major influence on "Ghost of Spatula". That and the death of my poor, burnt kitchen spatula."

Dream-inspired odes to Mother Dirt, shapeshifting animals, and the reptilian brain, are delivered earnestly from Liz Downing's time bejeweled book of songs, now reimagined by Greg Hatem's sampling and arrangements. The Curving Tooth refers to that rare and singular beauty to ponder.

Based in Baltimore, MD, Moth Broth has been casting spells and melodies since 2015. Their debut LP I, a Flying Crab features subjects ranging from fairies to beetles to climate change, skillfully written and sung by lyricist and prose author, Jake Budenz (Dreambaby). Greg Hatem (of Natural Velvet, Curving Tooth) provides musical direction and arrangements with his signature electric autoharp and psych-pop stylings. They are joined by Jason Charney (Mind on Fire), whose sparkling keyboards and guitar thicken the broth.