Euglossine – Complex Playground
3.16.15 by Mike Haley

I don’t know if you’ve ever shoe shopped for a child before, but it’s a borderline bonkers experience. All the foot gear in the store glows and/or flashes lights and/or sparkles in the most unnatural sparkly way possible. And they are so small, which I guess makes sense considering they are for small children with small feet, but it’s still weird seeing them. It’s like being in a regular shoe store on mushrooms. The socks are pretty normal though…

Now, I’m fully aware all those shoes were most likely made by small children with small feet in bummer conditions, so montage footage of the factory would probably pair best with some Sarah McLachlan downer vibes. But let’s pretend for a moment that the Earth was home to decent, non-awful beings. In that second-life scenario Euglossine would be blaring over the footwear assembly video while blithesome adults toted pouches of brightly colored LEDs, flickering off the power of joy, across the checkered-floored work areas. Assembly lines would be so jubilant they would make the chocolate scene from I Love Lucy look like a Dancer In The Dark sequel.

If sophisticatedly-wacky is a genre, Euglossine nails it. The futurecho’d blazed blips and lounge tinged condensation is repped hard by Tristan Whitehill on “Complex Playground”. He squirts candied zaps on these here tracks that boing about randomly, all fleshy and hypercolored. A randomness fastened together by a sea of Sega inspired jazz fusion rips. Whitehill manages to create something that shouldn’t make any sense, but makes so much. And he does it with casual composure. Because while you want those multineon kid shoes to beam and glisten, they also gotta fit snug and have one left and one right. Whitehill’s got the feet measured properly, EyeBodega fucking kiiiiilled the design, and Beer On The Rug is prepared to bring it all your way. You can preorder this C34 here. It will be limited to 100 copies. Try it on for size below.