Calvin LeCompte Offers a Scorched Slice of Psychedelic Americana with “Freeway”
The underground crooner’s video from the new album “Fu Lai Cai Lai 5 Seas Legends” is accompanied by visuals from your favorite musician’s favorite video artist, Tommy Malekoff.
Calvin LeCompte and Tommy Malekoff are two if-you-know artists who’ve been operating in their own respective lanes — LeCompte as a cult figure in underground music, Malekoff as a video artist whose work with Salem, Bladee, Yung Lean, and brands like Stüssy has made him one of the more singular eyes in the game. “Freeway” is where those lanes converge.
The track from LeCompte’s new LP Fu Lai Cai Lai 5 Seas Legends (what a name!) is a hazy, ebullient soundscape. It’s the kind of thing you want playing on a long drive as neon signs blur past a rain-streaked window, your corneas dilating. “Telecaster lines arriving one after another through long impressionistic arrangements,” writes LeCompte, adding that it’s “a narcotic record sparkling like baywater at three in the morning.”
The ambient drift of the track finds a natural visual counterpart in Malekoff’s hyperreal Americana imagery, where “Walgreens electric reds liquefying into sodium orange washing across the windshield.” It’s terrain Malekoff knows well. His practice has long been drawn to the places and situations most people scroll past, blending found footage, vérité, and staged scenes into something that sits between documentary and fever dream.
LeCompte goes on to describe “Freeway” as “American exhaustion wrapped in fluorescent optimism,” a feeling Malekoff has made something of a signature: the liminal, the overlit, the mundane tipping toward the sublime.
Watch the video above. Fu Lai Cai Lai 5 Seas Legends is out now via Maximum Exposure Inc.
