REVIEWS:
"The new album I think somehow breaks new ground for holy sonic icons, Bipolar Explorer, because it feels and sounds like a whole, an unstoppable beating heart that's emanating fragile sonics and thoughts and words at the fringes of consciousness and subconsciousness, sleep and waking, dream and vision."
-Max Reinhardt, Soho Radio/BBC 3 (London)

"This is an album of nocturnal dreamscapes, filled with restless shadows and dim pulsating lights to guide you on your way. Embarking on this long, winding, hallucinatory sound journey is like entering a dark labyrinth of ghostly atmospheres, psychedelic meanderings and mysterious whispers...Bipolar Explorer are an experimental dream-pop band based in New York City, and this is their latest release - a sprawling 2-hour long double-disc album, which is a bold and ambitious move to make in the year 2023, but this band have done it well...'In The Hours Left Until Dawn' is a haunting and immersive listening experience. Musically, it's an eclectic and psychedelic hotpot of moody shoegaze, laid-back alt-grunge, dirty post-rock and experimental sound art. The band use effects-laden guitars, moody basslines, spoken word poetry, ambient synths, airy drones, abstract field recordings, swirling vocalizations, percussive instruments and trippy audio manipulation techniques to create these gorgeous shimmering soundscapes that both haunt and comfort...'In The Hours Left Until Dawn' is an album of pure atmosphere and feeling. It's an epic accomplishment, and a gorgeous work of art that contains pop sensibilities, trippy experimentations and everything in between. Ideal introspective listening for the long quiet hours of the night. Highly recommended."
-Fog Songs (UK)

"An amazing album. Another new, beautiful soundscape from Bipolar Explorer! Two discs of wonderful, gorgeous, drifty music and strange, strange sounds. Utter dream sequences. I love it! It's just a beautiful work!"
- Irene Trudel, WFMU (New York)

"In The Hours Left Until Dawn is moody, atmospheric and filled with the calm vibrations we all need now. The music bed underlies explorations of darkness and light, all the while leaving us "a breadcrumb trail of stars" to light our way. My favorite new album of 2023."
- Carson Street, KFJC (California)

"A sprawling suite of instrumentals, sung and spoken word. Loss permeates the music, gracing it with a tragic mystery.”
- A Closer Listen (UK)

“A hallucinatory masterpiece. Grab this album.”
- Black_Ops Radio (London)

"Beautiful, shimmering, hypnotic, dreamlike; always a sense of passage through unnameable dimensions; the haunt is palpable but as an enveloping wonder and at times I felt I was listening to stained glass…"
- Uncertain Reverie (Portland, OR)

"Just a gorgeous, gorgeous album. A lot of their music has a really strong spiritual undercurrent and maybe never more evident than on this new record, which is actually a 2-CD set."
- Jeffrey Davison, CKUT (Montreal)

"A dark, delightful sound journey, simultaneously haunting and comforting."
-Conducive (UK)

"Pick of the Week!"
- White Light/White Heat (Italy)

INTERVIEWS:
May 10, 2023 interview with Michael by the legendary Max Reinhardt (BBC 3/Soho Radio) on his "Late Lunch Show" (segment opens the second hour of the two-hour show): www.mixcloud.com/sohoradio/max-reinhardts-late-late-lunch-show-10052023/

April 14, 2023 interview with Michael by Fringes of Sound editor Lars Haur here: youtu.be/fqNTvOjrkOg)

ABOUT THIS ALBUM:
Released on April 7th, 2023, "In The Hours Left Until Dawn" is Bipolar Explorer's 11th album. Advance airplay for the new album found it appearing in The Heavily Played Records charts of both New York's WFMU and California's KFJC, as well extensive previews on London's Resonance FM.

A double-album - 22 tracks over two discs and two hours - it weaves together strands of the experimental, the ambient, spoken word, field recordings sprinkled with instrumentation and shoegaze-y compositions in a kind of eclectic, deep-listening dreamscape.

"In The Hours" follows in the mold of two of the band’s most recent albums - 2020’s "Deux Anges" (another double-album) and 2021’s "Forests, Voices, Coastlines, Dreams: Recordings for The Dark Outside". While the latter (as its title may suggest), a collection of the band’s compositions for the UK’s storied experimental radio project, focused exclusively on the group’s more avant garde work and the former a more eclectic cross-genre endeavor, both mark the group’s affection for radio and their aim to create long-form soundscapes that evoke what the UK’s Norman Records has described as akin to “a distant late night radio transmission drifting to us as we lay half asleep in bed.”

"In The Hours Left Until Dawn" is available both digitally and as a limited edition double-CD with a 20 page booklet, shipping from both New York and France.


Summer Serafin - vocals, spoken word.
Michael Serafin-Wells - vocals, guitars, bowed guitar, bass, synth, organ, melodica, chimes, tape loops, percussion, spoken word.
Sylvia Solanas - spoken word, backing vocals.

All songs, music, lyrics and spoken word narrative poems by Michael Serafin-Wells. c. 2023 Thirteen November Music (ASCAP).

Recorded live, noisily and in a hurry at The Shrine - NYC.
Field recordings on location - New York, California, France, Northern Atlantic Coast.

Produced by Bipolar Explorer.
Mastered by Scott Craggs, Old Colony - Boston.
Graphics and booklet by Sylvia Solanas.
Layout by Audun Grimstad.
Booklet images via Internet Archive (public domain).
Cover image: “Night and Her Daughter Sleep” by Mary L. Macomber (1902, public domain).

For Summer with love forever.

c/p 2023 Bipolar Explorer, Slugg Records and Thirteen November Music (ASCAP)
All rights reserved.

A Note of Thanks:
Dear friends, it’s been quite a ride since we brought you "Deux Anges" in late 2020. Like many of you, the pandemic kept us from being with our friends and loved ones, and even one another, until 2022 arrived. We’re grateful that we were able to resume work and actually be in the same rooms - both here and in France - together, to write and record this album. We’re so grateful to all of you for your interest, for listening. And while we, also like you, miss those we’ve lost, achingly, we keep them in our hearts always - it’s really the animating principle of Bipolar Explorer, itself, our reason and compass. As you listen, perhaps falling into dreams, we hope these two hours of music and sounds will bring you safely through the night, to the other side. While lingering in dreams, may your own angels visit, whispering words of comfort and love. And may the memory of them, so doing, buoy you up upon waking and throughout all your days.

With thanks, love & faith,

Bipolar Explorer
New York City
April 2023

ABOUT THE BAND:
"Shimmering. There is hauntology at work. Hauntology right in the center of their work." -Max Reinhardt (Soho Radio/BBC Radio 3)

"Magical & majestic." -Indiemusic (France)

"Mesmerizing. A tiny gem that beguiles." -The Sound Projector (UK)

"Epic & affecting." -Surface Noise

"Beautiful, great drifty pop, full of sadness and wonder." -Irene Trudel, WFMU

“Mysterious. Otherworldly. An emotional musical journey.” - Carson Street, KFJC

"Celestial & spell-bounding compositions astounding us with beauty. Brilliant, luminous & cathartic. Puts shoegaze back into a state of grace." -Les Oreilles Curieuses (France)

"Ethereal music that sends the listener up towards the heavens to sit aloft on the clouds above. Truly ascendant." -Carol Crow, WFMU

BIPOLAR EXPLORER are an NYC-based experimental dreampop trio featuring Summer Serafin (vocals, spoken word), Michael Serafin-Wells (guitars, vocals, bass, organ, synth, melodica, tape loops, percussion, spoken word) and Sylvia Solanas (spoken word - English/French).

The signature interweaving of spoken word into the band’s work is described by the UK’s Norman Records as “a cross between Slowdive and Laurie Anderson - a late night radio transmission drifting to us, half asleep in bed”.

The eclectic nature of the band’s sound continued to evolve as they began contributing to the UK’s storied experimental radio project, The Dark Outside. More experimental pieces began appearing on the band’s albums with compositions that folded in field recordings with new instrumentation and tape loops and woven together with their existing ambient, spoken word and shoegaze-y anthems resulted in recordings more thematic, or as the group has taken to calling them “dreamscapes”.

Forging an unique sound well serves the new works Serafin-Wells began composing after the tragic loss of his partner, BPX co-founder, Summer Serafin, who passed away in 2011, just 31.

As Michael told Indiemusic’s Raphael Duprez in a feature about the band (February 2017): “All of this is entirely for her. I often say that our music, each album, is of, for and about her. Summer remains an integral part of the band - not only as its inspiration but, because I have an archive of her isolated tracks, her vocals grace each new album as I write songs and fly in her voice. Summer isn’t the main reason BPX goes on, she’s the only reason. She is the reason. And I think I can trust that I’m doing things for the right reason if I always know the reason for it is her. Not out of any ambition other than to honor and conjure her. She’s my conscience."

Of equal importance was the addition of French-born vocalist, Sylvia Solanas, who joined the group in 2018, singing backing vocals and voicing Serafin-Wells’s original narrative spoken word poetry beginning with their 8th album, "Til Morning is Nigh".

Bipolar Explorer’s albums include "In The Hours Left Until Dawn" (2023); "Forests, Voices, Coastlines, Dreams: Recordings for The Dark Outside" (2021); "Deux Anges" (2020); "Til Morning is Nigh: A Dream of Christmas" (2018); "Sometimes in Dreams" (2018); "Dream Together" (2017); "Electric Hymnal" (2016); "Angels" (2015); "BPXmas" (2014), "Of Love and Loss" (2012) and (pre-Summer) "Go Negative". All are available on Slugg Records.