Oh my god it’s so hot in this apartment.

It’s finally as hot as I wanted it to be when I released Space Camp Days a couple weeks ago. It’s a humid hellscape out there, and while today is overcast (thank god) the Vancouver summer heat still clings to every pore. It’s impossible to focus and my brain feels like potato salad. It’s impossible to think clearly enough to get any significant writing done. The heat isn’t the reason for my little hiatus this last week, but it might as well have been. I spent the whole week listening to King Gizzard. Who am I anymore.

It isn’t even August yet. 

I wanted it to be screaming hot out when I published Days, so you’d really be able to get into the summer camp spirit like when you were a kid, darting in sandals from shadow to shadow, cool basement to cool indoor arcade. The sun doesn’t really set until almost ten at night out here in the dead heat of the summer, and even then the warmth still radiates off the concrete far into the night. There’s a restlessness that comes with watching the sun go down that late into the evening, a sense that the day’s only just beginning as the clock pushes midnight, especially when you’re a nocturnal teenager trapped at a camp far from home. Or a nocturnal adult in quarantine. There’s really only six or so hours of true darkness in the middle of the summer, and you’d never sleep through them all. That’s the feeling I’m chasing with Nights.

Space Camp is the short-hand name I gave to that abandoned movie concept my friend and I came up with all those years ago, and we always intended for a nighttime component. The days would be all lens flares and washed-out nostalgia, but at night the camp would come alive with colour. You’d sneak out of your bunk and into the forest or the lab to party, explore or begin doomed, awkward summer flings. Your parents paid for you to be there through the day, but the night was when things happened, when the best memories were made. There’d be the camp prom too, fireworks. Eventually, there’d be the drive home.

So here’s Space Camp Nights: an hour of electronic pop and nocturnal dance music, the companion-piece to Days‘ garage rock and punk. It’s faster-paced and heavier than Days, and more intense. It also gets weirder and goes more places – after all, it has more ground to cover. There will be more of these, I think, and hopefully before the end of Summer. There’s a lot left on the cutting room floor.

It never really cools down, so why try to sleep?

Try listening after dark. And thanks.