Craft Spells

Craft Spells

Craft Spells

After a dormant period following the release of the Gallery EP in 2012, Craft Spells’ Justin Vallesteros is back with the gorgeously ambitious Nausea. It’s Craft Spells’ second proper full length LP, and first since 2010’s critically acclaimed Idle Labor. Since last on the radar, Vallesteros moved to San Francisco to find a niche in the Bay Area music scene. This proved difficult within the regarded garage rock scene and insular DJ night crowds currently dominating the area’s music community. Here, Vallesteros fell into a slump, creatively. With a severe bout of writer’s block, he retreated to his parent’s house in Lathrop, CA. Away from the city, he put down his guitar for a year in favor of training himself on piano, the instrument from which all the tracks for Nausea were written. Being in limbo between the city and the suburbs, Justin felt actual nausea, added to by an admitted semi-addiction to social media and he quickly found himself disillusioned. Vallesteros unplugged from that world as much as possible and completely immersed himself in the music (Emmit Rhodes and the solo works of Yellow Magic Orchestra’s Haroumi Hosono and Yukihiro Takahashi) and the writing (the works of Mishima, for one) that would come to inspire the LP.