Mission Creek Festival: Extravision
Friday, April 7 at 7 p.m., Riverside Theatre, Iowa City, included with festival pass
Ryan Stier has been making music with his band, Extravision, for roughly a decade now. The five-person group often mixes ambient, psychedelic sounds with folk lyrics and instrumentation.
Extravision will appear at Mission Creek 2023 — Iowa City’s annual three-day music and literature festival — on Friday, marking the third time Extravision has played at the festival, having opened for Esmé Patterson in 2016 and S. Carey in 2018.
“I’m always surprised when we are asked to play, and very grateful to be part of the festival,” Stier told Little Village in an email. “It’s my favorite festival in Iowa.”
Little Village is pleased to debut the video for “Every Fear” — the latest single from the Des Moines-based band.
“Every Fear” is part of Extravision’s forthcoming album,Temporary Fountain, planned for release later this year. Recording for the album began in the early days of the pandemic during a period when, Stier said, “time felt strange and glitchy and fragmented.” Though the finished song has a heavily synthesized sound, the early drafts were written as a banjo folk hymn.
According to Stier, “Every Fear” — and the eventual album as a whole — grapples with themes of death, love and self. As one of the first songs recorded for Temporary Fountain, “Every Fear” felt as though it marked a new direction for the band, Stier recalled.
“My band mate, Ben, had an idea to send my isolated vocal tracks through his pedal board, manipulating them into a sea of fragmentation,” Stier said. “We recorded them over and over in our home studio, and I subsequently had so much fun taking those tracks and making a musical collage with them. We took that idea and ran with it for a lot of the songs we were working on.”
Josh De Lanoit, a Des Moines area video editor, assembled this music video, which captures the ethereal quality of the song and the fears grappled with therein. Throughout the four-minute video we see Stier’s face — distorted, obscured and multiplied — in an ever shifting kaleidoscope of shape and color. As Stier sings in the video: “every Fear you fear is the fear of yourself.” It’s line’s like this the video editing emphasizes, highlighting an implicit dread that might not be immediately apparent on an initial listening.
Though Temporary Fountain is planned for a fall 2023 release, “Every Fear” is available now to stream and download through Extravision’s Bandcamp.
