Flushed cheeks usually come in pairs. Your cheeks sync up and fill with pigment, providing non-verbal bodily cues that your body temperature has been spiked by something: nerves, embarrassment, heat, arousal. Their flush blows your social cover and broadcasts that what you want is near enough to touch. When only one cheek flushes, this could be the result of a slap, self-administered or coming from someone who momentarily lost their cool. Or it is not at all about you or your body, but about the eyes of your beholder, affected by a form of myopic vision, a shortness of depth that only allows for one cheek to be seen at a time. It may be just an anomaly, like a body without organs, a film without images, or a song that erases words and, in this way, generates waves of anti-climaxes that come exactly when they’re supposed to, as if according to the grid.

What is there to “pop” in a song that simultaneously has and doesn’t have lyrics, a song that ends before it finds its way to its hypothetical-yet-absent anthemic chorus, a song that, while broody and loopy, still worms up into not one, but both of your ears? These conceptual questions underlie “One Flushed Cheek,” the newest album from Sadie Siegel, Seth Weiner’s music project and alter ego. For over a decade now, Sadie Siegel & Seth Weiner have explored the sculptural qualities of sound, thinking of the latter as a tactile expression of material and an architectural act. “One Flushed Cheek” is a continuation of this practice. Some of the album’s songs bring the artist’s characteristically fleeting chants and recordings of his domestic life, blended with synthetically generated beats and vocal fragments. At the same time though, with this new collection of compositions, the artist veers into a distinctly different creative place. It’s the first album where Sadie Siegel & Seth Weiner tackle conventional pop song structures through a series of simultaneous pushes and pulls, as if both resisting and succumbing to the music genre’s insistence on narrative language.

Sadie Siegel & Seth Weiner do not usually perform their music live, opting instead for creating an immersive, deep-listening experience. Imagining what form a physical record may take in a post-digital world, this project is set in the presentational form of a multimedia installation, accompanied by the album “giveaways,” i.e. the small, holdable textile sculptures pointing to a digital download of the songs and videos. Each track has a video made by Rafał Morusiewicz, a visual artist and Weiner’s longtime friend. The videos function less as a mere illustration of the album’s compositions, and more as an affective call-and-response to the endless creative-listening sessions that both artists had around the ephemeral and sculptural pop songs. Compulsive and collage- based, Morusiewicz’s practice consists in engaging, through editing and digital image-manipulation technologies, with audiovisual material drawn from online-based film archives and shadow libraries, and mixing it with original footage, shot in ongoing collaboration with their life partner, Guilherme Maggessi. The latter is the author of the album’s visual design and the producer of the exhibition’s setting, in which the project will be presented. Weiner, in turn, has expanded the core album by compiling a companion piece, “B-Sides,” a distant cousin to the album, which forms a self-standing record. All these are the core components of “One Flushed Cheek.”