ON AIR LIBRARY have shared a new video for ‘A Word From Benjamin Spock’, taken from their first EP, which is returning for its first vinyl pressing and first appearance on streaming services.

We’re sharing the video a day early, ahead of the single’s release on October 15. ON AIR LIBRARY started in New York in 1998 with Phillip P Wann and Claudia Deheza. Claudia’s twin sister Alejandra joined while the EP was being made, and the three recorded much of it at night in Wann’s East Village apartment. Wann was using a Tascam 388 eight-track tape machine at the time. “The people who lived below me were DJs and slept all day,” he remembers. The rest of the setup was similarly simple: tape loops, a Farfisa organ, Silvertone guitar, tube amps, a Roland Juno 60, a cheap Casio and three effects pedals. ‘A Word From Benjamin Spock’ is one of the most stripped-back tracks on the record. There are no drums, and not much in the way of conventional structure either. Claudia Deheza’s voice sits among long keyboard tones and low guitar, with everything given plenty of room. What she is singing about is much less vague. “Love isn’t something painful a child has to earn,” goes one of the lines.

The EP was originally pressed in a run of just 1,000 CDs. This new edition brings those six songs to vinyl for the first time and finally puts the record on streaming services as well. There is another piece of the band’s early history in the artwork. It uses an old black-and-white flyer showing the trio beneath the illuminated Twin Towers. The flyer was made for a New York show ON AIR LIBRARY had booked for September 11, 2001. In the years that followed, the band played with Hood, Xiu Xiu, Gang Gang Dance, Dirty Projectors, Interpol, The Album Leaf and others. Claudia and Alejandra Deheza would later go on to School of Seven Bells. The reissue also finds ON AIR LIBRARY active again. New music is on the way.